LXF SERVER
Set up and configure a custom RSS news feed
Deftly skirting the lines of legality, David Rutland reveals how he’s able to scrape all the news that’s good to read direct to his own server.
Part Three
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OUR EXPERT
David Rutland is far too busy to fill out this bio, so you’ll have to imagine that he has some exotic hobbies – chainsaw juggling, say.
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Some sites don’t have RSS feeds at all. It’s rare but true. In these cases you can usually generate a feed based on elements in a particular page using the feed generator at https:// createfeed. fivefilters. org. It’s fairly intuitive, but unless you pay for a subscription, your generated feeds are limited to five items.
Back in the early 2000s, RSS was the coolest gimmick in town. It was a way to get the latest headlines from your favourite blogs without needing to wait for your dial-up connection to load the complete webpage at 14.4kbps. A short snippet of text and a headline would let you know which Geocities sites had been updated, and independent bloggers would proudly syndicate their stories to other members of their webring to scroll in an endless ticker-tape parade across the screen.
The garish displays are long gone (thankfully), but RSS is more powerful than ever, and in part three of our virtual private server (VPS) series, we’ll show you how you can use RSS to avoid trackers, blast past paywalls and ensure that your very own VPS is the only site you need to visit.
These days 65 per cent of the world digests news online and many use an aggregator built into their phones and completely under the control of someone else. Whether it’s Google, Facebook or Apple, your reading habits are valuable, and the metrics of what you choose to click can be monetised. We don’t like that idea and, for some reason, we have the feeling that you’re not entirely comfortable with it, either.
For a technology that was birthed in the previous millennium, it may surprise you how widespread the RSS protocol is. Practically every site you visit today will have an RSS feed. From the BBC news pages to the latest acquisition by Future – via Reddit and your favourite cyberpunk fanzine – most web publishers pour out a torrent of unfiltered headlines, links, and a couple of paragraphs to let readers know what to expect should they choose to click through.
These juicy titbits are usually contained in an XML file, which is usually pretty easy to find on the main site. In most cases, they’re automatically generated by the CMS or site generator, without the site owners even knowing they exist. They’re sad, neglected things, and are rarely categorised: a veritable firehose of news, opinions and, well, garbage.