In the olden days, before the internet devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”1, the web was full of blogs, news sites and other content. And while you could just visit each page to find out if there were any updates, there was enough of them to make it a bit cumbersome to check every site. This was solved through a wonderful old web-standard called Really Simple Syndication (RSS)2 which provided a way for websites to publish feeds that could be pulled together by a feed reader to show users what’s new across all of their favourite websites at once.
In its day it was one of the key ways people kept up with blogs and news across the web, long before we all became accustomed to simply browsing our social feeds to find things. That was ok for a while, but as the years went by those feeds began to show us less of what we’d subscribed to, replacing it with ads, sponsored content and engagement traps.
Thankfully, RSS never really went away. Most blogs still support it, as do many news sites. It’s even possible to subscribe to someones Mastodon, Bluesky or Youtube account using it3. All you need is a feed reader – these come in multiple formats, you can have an app, a web based aggregator or a browser extension. All of these do the same thing – add the sites feed to your reader and it’ll handle letting you know about new content as it gets posted. It’s a powerful tool for taking back control of how you consume information4.
Many modern feed readers are smart enough that you can point them at the homepage of a blog and they’ll find the RSS feed automatically for you. For those that aren’t, you may need to look for the RSS icon to get the feed URL directly.
To help people get started, here’s some resources that might help people find blogs that suit their interests.
Blog Lists by Topic
Tabletop Miniatures & Wargaming – I maintain a list of tabletop mini related blogs on this website, you can find it here.
Tabletop RPGs – Mike Shea maintains a wonderful directory of RPG related blogs covering a wide variety of games (from D&D to Traveller and beyond)
Blog Directories / Discovery
ooh.directory maintains a wonderful catalogue, organized by subject.
blogroll.org has another great searchable catalogue
blogroll.club has an alphabetic list containing hundreds of blogs. They can also be browsed by category.
Smallweb by Kagi provides a fun discovery tool that allows you to randomly sample blogs until you find something interesting.
If you know of any other useful resources that belong on this page, please go ahead and post them as comments below.
- Credit to Tom Eastman, however the original tweet is no longer accessible ↩︎
- What is a feed? (a.k.a. RSS) | About Feeds provides a really good rundown on RSS and how to get started with it. ↩︎
- Here’s the instructions for Mastodon, BlueSky and Youtube ↩︎
- On this, I firmly find myself agreeing with Cory Doctorow ↩︎