The biggest cause of broken feeds for me is actually Cloudflare challenges on the feed URL.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="/atom/everything/">
Most feed readers know how to read that, so you can paste the URL of the blog itself into e.g. NetNewsWire and it will locate that rel="alternate" link and subscribe that way.Try to find link blogs, since those are more likely to help you discover other things to read.
There are curated lists:
Community lists (planets)
- https://www.planetpython.org/
Curated themes (like Bluesky starter packs):
- https://www.youneedfeeds.com/starter-packs
Webrings are cool again:
- https://brisray.com/web/webring-list.htm
This collection of HN blogs is pretty good too:
- https://github.com/outcoldman/hackernews-personal-blogs
I've been trying to aggregate many of these into a giant list, https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/, which is especially focused on OPML blogrolls: https://alexsci.com/blog/blogroll-network/
Or they could just use a modern webserver setup? Manually updating certs on webservers in 2025 is just a massive waste of time.
Also of the opinion many a personal site being dynamic is less than ideal. How many outdated php sites I've seen hijacked, ruined when their hosting service updates things behind their back, run into resource related issues, caching bodges that go wrong, etc. Meanwhile the site maybe gets updates like once a week.
At the very least the RSS feed certainly shouldnt need to be generated on every request unless theres good reason.
Well aware my complaints yelling at the void as many just want a prebuilt solution which 'just works', even if it requires a LAMP stack.
I’ve been trying to work out a new approach to newsreaders for a couple years now, and have all but given up on RSS. The standard needs to improve in significant ways — most notably with discoverability — if it ever wants to get back to the Google Reader “glory days”.
I’ve tried reporting bugs to rags like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, each one is a a black hole. Unless you can make a case for helping monetization, they don’t care at all, and I can’t say I blame them.
BoredPositron•4mo ago
LorenDB•4mo ago
crtasm•4mo ago
jerlam•4mo ago