Reading RSS With Elfeed

Irreal regulars know that I’m a huge fan of Christopher Wellons’ Elfeed. It’s an Emacs-based RSS reader that allows you to manage and read your RSS feeds from within Emacs. If you’re already an Emacs user, there’s no reason not to be using it.

Ramces Red has a post that explains how and why to use elfeed. Ramces covers the installation and configuration of Elfeed. Other than specifying which feeds you want to follow, you can get away with no configuration at all but Elfeed allows extensive customization. There’s also a thorough and flexible tagging mechanism that you can use to sort posts according to interest.

To me, the most useful thing Elfeed brings to RSS is the ability to store the feeds forever. They all go into a database that is searchable by date and content. Even years later, you can search and find an entry and as long as the original post is still online, you can revisit it.

The one thing that his post doesn’t mention is that you can maintain your list of feeds in Org-mode. To do that you need to load elfeed-org. After that, it’s easy to add or delete entries from your feed even if you aren’t an Elisp expert.

I can’t recommend Elfeed enough. Take a look at Ramces’ post to see why.

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