Set up and configure a custom RSS news feed

Part Three

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Back in the early 2000s, RSS was the coolest gimmick in town. It was a way to get the latest headlines from your favourite blogs without needing to wait for your dial-up connection to load the complete webpage at 14.4kbps. A short snippet of text and a headline would let you know which Geocities sites had been updated, and independent bloggers would proudly syndicate their stories to other members of their webring to scroll in an endless ticker-tape parade across the screen.

The garish displays are long gone (thankfully), but RSS is more powerful than ever, and in part three of our virtual private server (VPS) series, we’ll show you how you can use RSS to avoid trackers, blast past paywalls and ensure that your very own VPS is the only site you need to visit.

These days 65 per cent of the world digests news online and many use an aggregator built into their phones and completely under the control of someone else. Whether it’s Google, Facebook or Apple, your reading habits are valuable, and the metrics of what you choose to click can be monetised. We don’t like that idea and, for some reason, we have the feeling that you’re not entirely comfortable with it, either.

For a technology that was birthed in the previous millennium, it may surprise you how widespread the RSS protocol is. Practically every site you visit today will have