Rssdirectory.org publishes Downread's library of feeds and offers it as a category-based directory. The site works with any feed reader and supports one-click following in several popular readers. You can even customize the Follow button with your own URLs to add unsupported readers. Besides the directory itself, it has a section for publishers where feeds can be claimed and edited.

In the next few weeks, I plan to add a number of tools for publishers to the site, and will, if there is interest, publish the raw catalog on GitHub.

I have set up a second RFC: Feed HTML defines an HTML set for RSS readers and similar applications. This addresses a long-standing issue with RSS: it allows HTML, but no one defines which HTML features you can use. Many simple RSS readers support some semantic features like...

Just a few days ago I stumbled upon the <podcast:location> element in the Podcasting 2.0 spec, and wondered whether anybody uses this.

Today, I found radar.rss.io on Hacker News, which is the first time I've seen the location element actually being used. The Podcast Radar allows you to find podcasts near you, or any location you select on a globe. I was surprised how many were produced near where I live. Hopefully, a feature like that will soon be added to one of the podcast directories.

Dave Winer's 'source' extensions add functionality that elevates RSS from a simple protocol for reading posts to a system that lets you consume posts like social media, with user profiles, comments, and likes. I have written about rss.chat before.

Unfortunately, these features are missing from my favorite feed format, JSON Feed. So I took the liberty of documenting a JSON Feed extension that adds them to JSON Feeds. You can find my RFC here. Downread already supports this extension.

When I started this blog, I promised that I wouldn’t make it about my RSS reader, but would limit my Downread coverage to one post when it is ready. This is the post. Downread (my personal account) Why does the world need another RSS reader? Without a doubt, you could argue ...

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how to build an alternative to today's social networks using technology that is not only free but also much simpler. Recent developments, such as Reddit's decision to shut down its RSS feeds, make this even more urgent. One project I ...

This document has been posted to Hacker News this weekend: RSS Feed Best Practices I was going to publish something similar to this - it's been on my To-Do list for a while. But for now, I'd recommend using this, with one big exception: the Styling section. Here is what it i...

Interesting article about the difficulty of getting/discovering replies in a RSS Chat world and possible solutions.

https://quantumgardener.info/notes/rss-replies-are-promising,-but-discovery-is-the-hard-part

That makes me think about a possible role for Downread's feed catalog. Downread already evaluates and stores RSS Chat's inReplyTo. But it's not using it yet. It could, however, use it to create a list of replies to a post or feed. Maybe that's a useful feature worth exploring.

I believe RSS syndication has a fundamental problem that limits its adoption. It's not anything technical — not the format, not the readers. It's the content: it is very hard to make a living by publishing full content via RSS. How the web pays for content today Most profess...

You may have heard about Dave Winer's rss.chat, a social network designed to find out whether RSS 2.0 "can be used as the backbone of a real social network". This is what it looks like when you visit https://rss.chat: The whole thing confused me initially, and if you have h...

I have come across this article about CSS-related vulnerabilities in email clients. It's quite shocking what you can do with CSS if you render arbitrary CSS from a third party. RSS readers have challenges similar to email clients: they both embed HTML from untrusted third pa...

There is this old argument about whether Atom is really superior to RSS. It comes back every once in a while, and also this weekend on Hacker News. Like so often, the central point is the format and encoding of texts and dates. Here, the main example is the <title> ele...

There was a time, back in the 2000s and early 2010s, when RSS was nearly mainstream. All enthusiasts knew it, and most used it. Websites prominently featured their RSS buttons. Web browsers had built-in RSS support. And Google Reader made RSS accessible to regular users. But...

Hi, Human here! I just wanted to give you some background on this blog, why it exists, and how everything came together. Just be aware that you are reading this weeks after I originally wrote it, in July 2026. I’m a bit of a serial project abandoner. More on that later, but...