I have been sloooooowly pecking away at a document titled Make Your Own System For News Monitoring and Breaking Alerts With RSS, IFTTT, and Pushover . As the demise of Twitter appears more and more certain, I’m trying to document and structure all the ways I keep up with urgent news into a framework that I can teach.

RSS has a big part in what I’m developing as it’s both open and ubiquitous. As I write about it, I’m getting ideas about possible tools to make RSS better. And now that I’ve got a grip on JavaScript and access to GPT-4, I can turn all the ideas into all the things. My RSS tool collection is now large enough that I’m giving it its own home at RSSGizmos.com .

RSSGizmos.com currently offers the following tools in an ad-free, cookie-free, yes-it-is-free environment:

Kebberfegg — Make keyword-based RSS feeds for a dozen different sources including Reddit, Bing, and Google News.

WikiRSS — Search Wikipedia for articles which contain RSS feeds as part of their Wikidata.

CountryFeed — Make country-specific RSS feeds using Bing News’ loc: syntax and get them bundled in an OPML file.

WordPress Preview — Preview and compare RSS feeds for WordPress.com tag and keyword searches.

Bing News Query Checker — Test and three different queries for a Bing News RSS feed.

RSS Feed Viewer — Preview an RSS feed.

Feed Freshness Checker — Analyze up to 20 feeds at a time for post age and frequency.

OPML Maker — Turn a bunch of RSS feeds into an OPML file.

OPML Peeler — Extract the RSS feeds from an OPML file to display them and make them available as a CSV file.

This site is static HTML instead of WordPress, so everything should work on your phone. I tested the site with an iPhone 6S and it was fine.

Let me know if you have any ideas for additional tools. I will add more as I need them.