For the Love of God, Add an RSS Feed to Your Tech Blog

I built my own news aggregator. Every morning I wake up, build the feed, and spend about an hour reading posts from blogs I trust. No algorithms. No ads. No AI-generated slop fighting for my attention. Just good writing from people I chose to follow. You can see it yourself at ryanxcharles.com/news.

Life is good. Except for one infuriating problem.

The Crime Scene

Here’s what happens at least once a week. I’m reading a post from a blog I follow. The author links to another blog. I click through. The post is great. Interesting perspective, clear writing, someone worth following.

So I look for the RSS feed.

I check the header. Nothing. I check the footer. Nothing. I view the page source and search for <link rel="alternate". Nothing. I try appending /feed, /rss, /feed.xml, /rss.xml, /atom.xml to the URL. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

A tech blog. Written by a developer. In 2025. Without an RSS feed.

Why.

My Workflow, Interrupted

When a blog has an RSS feed, adding it to my aggregator takes about ten seconds. I copy the feed URL, add it to my sources file, and I’m done. Tomorrow morning, their posts show up alongside everything else I read. Frictionless.

When a blog doesn’t have an RSS feed, I have three options. I can bookmark it and remember to check back manually, which I will not do. I can follow them on social media, which defeats the entire purpose of building my own aggregator. Or I can just… not follow them.

Guess which option wins most often.

”But Social Media Exists”

Yes, I’m aware. I could follow you on X, where your posts compete with AI slop, engagement bait, ads, and whatever Main Character Drama is happening today. I could check LinkedIn, where your technical insights are sandwiched between hustle culture posts and congratulations on work anniversaries.

Or—and hear me out—I could subscribe to your RSS feed and read your posts directly, in chronological order, without a corporation deciding whether your content is worthy of my attention.

If you had one.

It Takes Five Minutes

Here’s the thing that makes this so frustrating: adding an RSS feed to a blog is trivially easy. If you’re using any modern static site generator, it probably already supports RSS and you just need to enable it. If you’re building something custom, there are libraries that generate feeds in a few lines of code.

I use the feed npm package. It generates RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds. The entire integration took maybe twenty minutes, and most of that was deciding what metadata to include.

If you don’t want to figure it out yourself, ask any LLM. Say “add an RSS feed to my blog” and it will write the code for you. This is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem since 1999.

There is no excuse.

Please, I’m Begging You

RSS is how the open web is supposed to work. You publish content. I subscribe. No intermediary decides what I see. No algorithm optimizes for engagement. No company tracks my reading habits to sell ads. Just a direct connection between writer and reader.

If you’re writing a tech blog—especially if you’re writing about open source, decentralization, privacy, or taking control of your digital life—please practice what you preach. Add an RSS feed.

You can see my aggregated news at /news. If you want to follow my blog, I’ve made it easy: /follow explains exactly how to subscribe via RSS, Atom, or JSON feed. One click and you’re done.

Please. For the love of God. Add an RSS feed to your tech blog.