How to Build Your Own Media Feed with RSS + Gmail

As I laid out in an earlier post, it makes a lot of sense to choose your own media diet. This post walks you through how to do that for only $1.50/mo. I think that’s a good price for your personal data and sanity. 

1. Find the RSS feeds of sites you like

For example my local paper the Star Tribune has their rss feeds in their site footer. You can also look for the orange wifi-like symbol on the article or feed page. 

So for the star trib I have this link: https://www.startribune.com/local/index.rss2

For older sites or blogs often you can find the link for the rss feed by adding /feed to the end of the domain name i.e. https://moreneighbors.org/feed/ 

If you check that link in your browser and it throws an error you might have to find the feed manually. You do that by going to the relevant blog page, right click, select “view page source”, then control + F  for “rss” and you should find a feed to use. 

2. Create a blogtrottr account

Go to: https://blogtrottr.com/

I would highly recommend you upgrade to the paid plan $1.50/mo. That removes the banner ads. 

3. Then put the rss feed link into Blogtrottr

https://blogtrottr.com/

4. Confirm your subscription in your email

5. Once the emails come in you can start organizing them into folders.

You click the top right 3 dots within the email you want to sort, then click “filter messages like this”

Then click create filter

Then select “skip the inbox” “apply” label (you will have to create these labels per your needs), then “also apply filter to x conversations”

Then your content will show up in your inbox in the labels section

If this it too complicated here are a few alternatives that I considered:

Alternative 1: Change your social media settings

While you could go into settings and turn off recommendation algorithms and choose your own feeds on sites like reddit or bluesky. Some of the sources I follow are not on those sites, and I am still being tracked and advertised to and such. I could probably make it work, but I haven’t quite done that yet. However if you are looking into a simpler solution, that is one to consider. 

Alternative 2:  RSS reader

Also as I mentioned in the previous post, I use email (gmail currently) as my RSS reader and not a RSS reader like TinyTinyRss or inoreader. I do this for a few reasons. 

1. Some blog feeds are not currently listed in those readers, so you have to build your own. 

2. I have to navigate a new interface and download new apps.