Before I begin, I must confess that I am a n00b to the RSS game. I never used Google Reader and couldn't understand why people lamented the sunsetting of Google Reader. But from what I am researching now, it seems it was a great product. Still don't know why Google sunset it.
I encountered RSS because I was searching for solutions for a specific use case I had. To keep up with the pace of development in Application Monitoring space and generate insights, I wanted to monitor different forums where people are talking about topics relevant to our business. For those unaware, I run a business in application monitoring space and understanding where the market is going is a key part of my job.
Developers are inquisitive folks and they like to talk about products which they use & like. So, most of the conversations in developer world is siloed in different communities & forums like twitter, reddit, hacker news, etc. How do I get a single pane of view on relevant discussions in different forums?
With some research, I realised that RSS feeds are the best way to aggregate information from different sources in a single feed. I can set searches in different forums for specific keywords and configure RSS feeds for them. As of now I have RSS feeds set up for following forums:
- Hacker News
- Google Alerts - which scans many public websites & blogs
For setting up Twitter feeds, I use Queryfeed to configure RSS for search results. The RSS client I use is Inoreader. It has a good free tier plan of 150 RSS feed subscription which should be good enough for my use case. I use it mostly in web browser, but it also has a decent Mac Desktop app & Android app.
Below is a screenshot of how it looks like
Inoreader for RSS feeds
I am still looking to add more commnities in this RSS setup. In particular communities like
- Github
- Gitter
- Discord
If you have any experience on how can I setup RSS for above forums, would love to chat. Ping me at pranay at signoz dot io