I (re)discovered RSS a few months ago via NetNewsWire, and it’s so calming and empowering to curate one’s own feed.
Rumors of RSS’ death are greatly exaggerated.
Personally I keep it syncing off TTRSS for filtering and automatic actioning on certain feed entries, but that aint everyone's cup of tea. I'd like to think NNW at least covers most people's use cases whether standalone or relying off another service to aggregate.
So if you want to make news feed from news sites, you have to use parsing their html code, and ofc everybody has its own structure. JS powered sites are painful ones.
edit: provide an example please
Now the news site and admin console is all in Next.js and slow and no feed.
https://help.abc.net.au/hc/en-us/articles/6147104938383-Why-...
A truly funny story: I wrote an rss aggregator and one day I discover some feeds had died without me noticing it. I looked at the feed, it was gone, I look at my aggregate and the headlines were all there?!?!
Since I gather a lot of feeds I couldn't help but noticed that a very large amount isn't wellformed. For example, in xml attributes the & (in urls) is suppose to be &, if you do that however many aggregators won't be able to parse it.
Every other month I wrote little bits of code to address the most annoying issues. 1) if I cant find a <link> or <guide> etc I eventually just gather <a>'s and take the href. 2) if I really cant find a title for the item I had it fail back on whatever is in the <a> since I was gathering those anyway. 3) if I cant even find an <item> I just look for the things that are suppose to go in the <item> 4) if I cant find a proper time stamp ill try parse one out of the url 5) if the urls are relative path complete them.
What was actually going on: The feed was gone, it redirected to the home page. In an attempt to parse the "xml" it eventually resorted to gathering the url and title from the <a>'s and build valid time stamps from the urls.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/feed/51120/rss.xml
I haven't fully examined it but looking at the xml I see it was last build in 2026 and a headline about Women's Asian Cup 2026.
abc.net.au/news/2026-03-05/matildas-iran-asian-cup-quick-hits-hayley-raso-mary-fowler/106413886
It may be a reflection of where you get your news.
New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Radio Free Europe, Mainichi, and lots of other legitimate primary source Big-J journalism news sites have RSS.
Rando McRepost's AI-Generated Rehash Blog? Not so much.
I have a whole collection of feeds alread, which I have no knowledge of at all. Many I've never even heard of. Is this a default thing, or was I accidentally bookmarking RSS feeds or something years ago and never knew?
Just look at it, NNW is still using the same great design.
I read plenty of X as well as scroll through various social media apps and nothing comes close to how great RSS feels to read.