How to use rss feeds

Why would you use an rss feed

• It is more convenient to have everything in one place.
• You don't have to deal with all the bloat of modern websites when you just want to see what new videos the channels you like on YouTube have posted.
• It's cool

How to get the rss feed for different services

1. YouTube
You might be surprised to hear that YouTube actually has an rss feed for all YouTube channels on their own website, they have been doing this for many years and are still doing it to this day.
How to get it? Well, they do not provide you with the link on the channel page or anything of the sorts but instead you have to do a little hacking in order to get your greasy hands on that sweat sweat rss.

Previously you went to the channel main page and in the URL you would find the channel id.
But nowadays the process is a bit more complicated, so follow this steps:
1. Go to the channel's main page, for example:
   https://www.youtube.com/@MentalOutlaw
2. View the page source
3. Search for the following string "externalID" (do a Ctrl + f)
4. Copy the string in it, it should look something like this
   UC7YOGHUfC1Tb6E4pudI9STA
5. Add your channel id after channel_id=
   https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=
   Like this
   https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC7YOGHUfC1Tb6E4pudI9STA
There is an easier way to get your rss feed and it preferable if want to get a bunch of rss feeds for a lot of YouTube channels which is by using a script. I might make one someday.
2. Reddit
This is only really useful if you are using it for smaller subreddits or else your rss feed is going to get spammed with a thousand different (mostly) low quality posts.
So how do you do it? Just add .rss to the URL of your subreddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/guro.rss



And you will also find a lot of websites that have an rss feed, including personal websites so keep an eye out for the rss symbol

Using a client

In this guide I will be using newsboat which is a cli client for UNIX like operating systems so if you use windows burn your hard drive buy a new one and install Gentoo on it.

Installing it
1. Use your distro's package manager
2. Compile it yourself big boy

   How to use it

   First you need to go to ~/.config/newsboat/ (if it is not created create it) and make a file called 'urls' and just put your rss feeds on there like this.
   So there you have it a working rss client that will work on most usable OSes.

   More features of newsboat

   Do you want to use vi like keybindings with newsboat? create a file named config in .config/newsboat and add the following lines to it
   bind-key j down
   bind-key k up
   
   Open a YouTube video on newsboat
   Did you know that mpv can open YouTube videos by just providing the URL? add this to your config to open mpv with the YouTube video from newsboat
   macro v set browser "devour mpv %u " ; open-in-browser ; set browser Firefox
   you can remove devour if you don't want to install it but I recommend as it "devours" the newsboat terminal windows and opens mpv in it's place. Install devour
   So now whenever you want to open the video go to the video on newsboat and press "," and "v" one after the other.