Rediscovering RSS

2026-04-18

Now that I have an RSS feed, I downloaded NetNewsWire to see what it looked like. Not bad, but it made me offer “full” posts instead of “partial” because I want to reduce the friction for folks. I’m not serving ads or doing any tracking so why not make it easy?

The nice thing (for me) is that it has Mac and iOS apps and syncs using iCloud. Also, free!

But do you know who doesn’t make it easy? NPR. After finding a valid RSS feed (this is the feed for Morning Edition) and a list of IDs (thanks random Redditors!) I was able to construct a plethora of feeds.

Take the general feed text

https://feeds.npr.org/collectionID/rss.xml

and replace collectionID with the id listed for the topic/show you’re interested in. In my random testing, the ids all work but there may not be any recent updates (e.g. Science Friday, collectionID 61, was last updated in 2013 before it moved).