Episode: 4106
Title: HPR4106: My tribute to feeds
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4106/hpr4106.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:39:48

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4106 from Monday the 29th of April 2024.
Today's show is entitled, My Tribute to Feeds.
It is hosted by Henrik Hemrin and is about four minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, Feeds are useful to keep me updated with new information from websites
I am interested in.
Welcome to Hacker Public Radio.
My name is Henrik Hemrin and I am your host today.
I will talk about information feeds from websites delivered to my computer device.
I use the term Feeds and by that I mean both RSS feeds and atom feeds, the two feed
protocols which are very similar.
I believe it's very likely you as a listener to Hacker Public Radio know about feeds.
Not unlikely you even know the technical details far better than I do.
Anyway nowadays many of us use feeds very often without thinking of them as feeds when
we subscribe to podcasts.
But feeds have been around for many years.
Back in the days I used feeds for websites I was interested in, but somehow I forgot
about it and web browsers stopped to support feed subscriptions.
A year or two ago I started my new journey into feeds.
Although it's not so much talk about feeds nowadays, very many websites have support for
feed subscriptions.
To start at my own personal website many of the pages have feeds, typically those that
are blog-like pages.
And you can subscribe to several feeds on my site.
From Hacker Public Radio I subscribe to feed for all show comments.
So when you write a comment regarding my show today I will get notified in my feed manager.
I primarily use Thunderbird to manage my feeds.
I do not need my feeds to be synced to other devices.
So Thunderbird which I use daily for emails is therefore very practical and natural for
me to use also for feeds.
In addition I use the feeder app on my Android-based phone for some feeds.
I do not use feeds for websites I anyway will visit often or that have a lot of news.
I would be overwhelmed of feeds.
Instead I use feeds for websites which are not updated so frequently, but are sites I
want to keep an eye on.
But some are updated daily like from the parliament.
In some cases feeds are an alternative to subscribe to email notifications and email
newsletters.
But the beauty with feeds is that I'm in charge and without giving out email or anything
and the site owner will not know I subscribe.
This starts so simple as I type the feed URL into my Thunderbird feed manager and when
I want to end a subscription I'd simply delete it.
Furthermore I subscribe to status pages.
I get notifications for example from my internet service provider for the planned and unplanned
main incidents.
Several authorities have interesting feeds.
I have feeds from some companies and organizations.
I have feeds from many software developers for example Thunderbird and Linux Mint.
I have feeds from some journalists and politicians and alike.
I have feeds from persons with competence in various areas I'm interested in and other
persons who I'm interested in for the persons they are and their thoughts.
So this show is to tell you that I have rediscovered feeds and found them useful for me.
Maybe you already use feeds.
Maybe this show will inspire you to have a look into feeds as a useful tool for your personal
or professional life.
Thank you for listening.
Take care and goodbye.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio does work.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find out
how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive and
rsings.net.
On this advice status, today's show is released under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.
