Intro
Change has an energy barrier. To do anything new you need help to get over that hump, make a change, and enjoy the rewards of your new situation. I have written in the past about my efforts to remove distractions by limiting my phone’s functionality with, if I’m being honest, the aim to remove doom-scrolling and short form content. Ideally becoming a more present person who, when they do consume content, consumes high-quality content mindfully.
I think the start of 2025 will be the kick many need to move off of social media, the corporate algorithms and take up the “old ways” by finding places on the web that independently cater to them and their interests. Heck that was always the draw of YouTube - finding a person crazy passionate about something super niche. I also want to be clear - I dumped Facebook in 2017 and have never looked back - twitter at a similar time. I did not however, until this month, spend regular, concerted, time seeking independent blogs and insights.
This was recently covered in the Irreal blog about getting back to blogging. A post that encouraged me to add an RSS link at the top of each page on this site. I have taken significant steps to be more mindful about the content I take in and independent blogs, substacks and link aggregators.
Early 2025 has been my kick to look at my tools for doing this. I used Feedly during my PhD to pull together journal feeds but since the late 2010s I lost my way. I have dabbled in other services but nothing stuck. For someone who’s work and life is kept in Emacs and org-mode I suspect elfeed is invaluable and so, below, I document my current set-up for any future travellers in this space.
Elfeed
Elfeed is an RSS reader for Emacs - you can install it with the below somewhere in your config:
(use-package elfeed
:ensure t
:config
:bind ("C-x w" . elfeed))
To add feeds however with the default setting can be a pain and hard to maintain or version control. For this reason elfeed-org can be a useful tool. This allows for easy addition and organisation of feeds that are kept outside your config file.
(use-package elfeed-org
:ensure t
:config
(setq rmh-elfeed-org-files '("~/Dropbox/org/elfeed.org"))
(elfeed-org))
Below is an example of a file - in the above stored in ~/Dropbox/org/elfeed.org
* Blogs :elfeed:
** Emacs
*** https://irreal.org/blog/?feed=rss2
*** https://sachachua.com/blog/feed/
*** https://protesilaos.com/master.xml
** SubStacks
*** https://www.operatorshandbook.com/feed
*** https://catherineprice.substack.com/feed
** Work
*** https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/s/gxcuf89792/rss/board?board.id=FinOpsBlog
** Tech
*** http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
** Science
*** https://www.nature.com/nature.rss
I use symlinks for this so that it can be backed up with the rest of my config files and version controlled in Git.
So there you go, nice and simple. Add feeds to your hearts content and keep checking back in by running M-x elfeed to see all your sites in one place. I can suggest looking at tagging with elfeed-org for great filtering. If you need any more info I cannot recommend Prot’s video on this enough - it is a great overview of what you should be aiming for.