One bright spot in the whirlwinds of 2025 is RSS. Possibly my favorite Internet tool is getting a new resurgence of interest as netizens realize there’s a big beautiful Internet outside the confines of social media, which gets ever-shittier. And who’s surprised? RSS feeds make it easy to follow news sources without getting a lot of extraneous junk. And once you bring filtering and keyword-based feeds into the mix, you’ve got the ingredients for a powerful Internet monitoring solution.
(Are you new to RSS? Want more introductory information? Here’s a substantial overview with lots of resources.)
I’ve been using RSS feeds since January 2000 (really!) which is long enough to develop a wishlist of little tools I would want when using RSS. When I started learning JavaScript in mid-2022, RSS tools were one of my first thoughts. A couple years ago I launched RSS Gizmos, a set of web-based tools for finding, creating, and using RSS feeds.
This week I redesigned RSS Gizmos and added a new tool, RSSForager, which is a WordPress-assisted RSS feed discovery tool. After all, what’s the good of RSS feeds if you can’t find any you want in your feed reader? In this article I’m going to show you how RSSForager works and how you can use it to find useful RSS feeds. Like all of RSS Gizmos, RSSForager is free to use and free of ads.
RSSForager fetches an RSS feed of your choice or analyzes the text block of your choice. (If you use text block analysis, don’t use more than a couple thousand words.) From that data the program extracts what I call “midrange” keywords — words that are frequent in the text but not particularly rare linguistically. The keywords are presented to you in a series of checkboxes. Your job is to pick the keywords you’d like to see in other RSS feeds. The default RSS feed to analyze is CBS News’ science feed, the keywords of which currently look like this:
You might be able to infer from the keywords what some of the news is about — hurricanes whirling around in the Atlantic as well as the passing of Jane Goodall, may she dance in Heaven forever. I’m going to try just two keywords: “jane” and “goodall”; I’ve discovered current event keywords are good for finding news sources. RSSForager will search WordPress for the keywords in various combinations for a total of up to ten searches, then dedupe the results and present them to you as a list.
If you click Preview, the latest entries from that feed will drop down for you to review.
The copy URL copies the URL for the feed so you can drop it in your feed reader. Open will open the feed in a new browser feed. Finally, Analyze will begin the keyword extraction process for that RSS feed.
RSS feeds are vital to ResearchBuzz; I could not do my self-appointed job without them. If you’ve always wanted to use RSS feeds but didn’t know where to find any, explore the tools at RSS Gizmos and especially RSSForager. Your feed reader will be full before you know it.
