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Back in May for the Cartoonist Coop’s Nib and Ink Fest, I did a pretty in-depth talk on RSS. You can still watch the talk here on youtube, but folks were also asking for a written version so I present to you:

Hello, welcome to RSS & You, a rundown on what RSS is, how webcomics can utilize it, and how readers can organize what they’re reading. This is for webcomic creators and readers alike.

I’m Jey Pawlik and you may know me from that RSS intro comic that I posted in 2022 that kind of exploded! It’s been shared around so much, it’s still getting replies and comments with suggestions and questions. This made me realise that there were a few things I needed to expand upon, there’s only so much you can fit into a 3 page comic after all.

Picture this, you have a bookmark folder FULL of webcomics you keep up with. You check each one every week, or maybe every month, to see if they’ve updated because social media is getting more and more unreliable and you may never see the update post about it. However this makes the task of keeping up with a webcomic more daunting and laborious — but what if I told you it doesn’t HAVE to be like that? What if I told you, there’s something that’s been around for decades that will just GIVE you those updates as they happen? No more checking, no more guesswork.

Enter RSS and never miss another update again!

With RSS, I get notifications every time a webcomic updates. Oh, look, there’s two new updates for me. Let me just click on that and I’m sent RIGHT to the latest page. With RSS you can get webcomic, website articles, social media posts, podcasts, and more to a feed you make and control yourself!

Shoutout to Clover for letting me use Pia And The Little Tiny Things as an example, be sure to add this one to your RSS reader after the talk~

Okay let’s get into it, what is RSS exactly?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”, but to put it in simple terms: RSS is an update feed that most websites have by default (I’ll go over those that don’t in a bit) and every time the site publishes a post, article, or comic page the feed is updated. Users can use feed readers to follow RSS feeds which will populate their reader with posts from those websites. The user has complete control over their feed, so when they follow an RSS feed they will get posts ONLY from the sites they follow. There are no ads, data collection, tracking, or algorithm, and it will not show you posts from people you DON’T follow.

So you’re visiting a webcomic site, you’ve caught up to the latest page and you like it so much you want to follow the RSS feed. In most cases you’ll find it as either the text “RSS” or as the button shown in the slide. These can usually be found in the top menu, footer, or a sidebar. If, for whatever reason, the site you’re using does not have a button anywhere — never fear because RSS is just a URL and you can usually just tack either /RSS, or /feed onto any URL to get the RSS as shown in the slide.

Here’s how I have it set up on Topaz Comics. I have both RSS in the top menu and a little sidebar showing the three latest updates.

Doesn’t it look enticing? Don’t you want to follow it?!

If you run a webcomic I HIGHLY recommend putting your RSS link in an easy to find spot.

You’ve got the RSS URL but now what? When you click on the button, it just looks like a string of code, or if you’re using Firefox it asks you to download the code — you don’t need to download anything, I promise! This is where feed readers come in and they will read that code for you!

Let’s talk Feed Readers!

There’s so many but I’ll just list a few that I’ve tried out myself. I spent a long time testing these ones out, usually for a week or so to give them a proper go.

We’ve got Feedly, a pretty standard reader and I really like the extension it has, but the company isn’t the best and I’ll get into that later.

Feedbro is the other reader that I like, but it works better for social media posts than webcomics and this is just a personal preference.

Inoreader is very similar to Feedly but I didn’t like their UI or extension as much as Feedly, but a lot of folks recommended this and seem to really like it. Note: you cannot export your feed with the free version!!

Thunderbird is owned by Mozilla (which I’m a big fan of) and was neat because it’s an email client that you can follow RSS feeds from.

Feedbin felt a lot like Feedly to me and while you can sync your feed to other devices you do have to pay $5 per month, which I can’t say I recommend because there’s a lot of free options out there — especially if they’re open source.

The last one I tried, and really want to come back to, is Ukagaka Ghost, this one is such an outlier compared to the others because it’s a desktop buddy that you can program and edit yourself and it tells you when an RSS has updated, the only reason I haven’t continued to use it as a main feed reader is because it’s very time consuming to set-up*, but I do recommend looking it up and falling into the rabbit hole that is Ukagaka.

*Since this talk I have started the tutorial on making my own Ukagaka, albeit very slowly but it has been fun to draw and tinker with

After trying all those out, eventually I settled on two: Feedly for webcomics, and Feedbro for social media, so these will be the ones I’ll be using in my examples going forward. I do recommend trying a few out to see which ones work best for you, they all look a bit different and have their own pros and cons but what might work best for me may not be your cup of tea. Spend some time with them and get a feel for your feeds~

Okay, we’ve picked out feed reader for now.

Using Feedly as my example here, we’ll take that RSS URL we got earlier and plug it into “Follow Sources”. This might be a bit different reader to reader, but there will always be some kind of “Input your RSS here” option. Feedly also has a feature where if you don’t have the RSS URL sometimes you can just plug the website in and it will find the feed URL for you — but beware this might not always work or it might give you an outdated one if, say, the person moved hosts or websites. This happened to me a few times when I was first populating my feed and I just didn’t get updates from a comic I followed. Giving it the RSS URL you got from the source the most reliable for sure!

From here on it’s super easy, just clicking the feed you’ll have the option to follow it! I like putting the comics I follow into folders and here’s where you’ll have the chance to do that and organize. I have a folder for webcomics, manga, news, and then a separate folder for my own website feeds.

Now you have all the webcomic’s updates ready to read!

From here you’ll be able to customize how you want your feed to look.

Like your updates as tiles with thumbnails? What about a scrollable feed where you see the whole page plus the author’s description?

Most readers are customizable to your tastes! Play around with it, see what works best for you!

So I don’t actually touch the Feedly site itself, instead I have the Feedly Firefox extension to notify me every time a webcomic updates. I see a little red number appear and I know there’s a comic page waiting for me. My ideal way of reading a webcomic is on it’s own website so this method works best for me. All I have to do is click the update title there and it automatically takes me to the website AND marks the update as ‘read’ so it doesn’t stay in my dropdown drawer.

Feedly isn’t the greatest company, with the free plan you can only follow 100 feeds (most corporate readers have some kind of cap, (I know Inoreader’s cap is 150). They’re also really pushing for AI garbage, AND have added an “Explore” tab on their site which defeats the purpose (and spirit) of RSS.

But I haven’t found a reader I like better for webcomics — especially since the only time I open the Feedly site is to actually ADD a new comic and that’s it.

I did say I tried out a good number of readers.

You’re probably thinking to yourself, “wasn’t that a lot of work?”

I know all of you are sick of moving social media sites every few years, but this is where RSS is SUPERIOR once again! Switching to another RSS reader is honestly so easy. Every reader gives you the option to export your feeds as either an XML or OPML (or both). Taking this file you can import all the feeds you follow to any other feed reader in a matter of seconds!

Here’s an example of the two steps it takes to move from Feedly to Feedbro, if I ever wanted to.

Like I mentioned before I do use two different feed readers. Feedly for webcomics and Feedbro for reading social media posts.

After the downfall of Twitter and folks were moving to so many different sites, I thought, could I make one big feed of all my friends’ posts without having to switch between tumblr, bluesky, and mastodon?

Almost every website has an RSS after all and this includes most social media sites.

I’d tried to use Feedly for this at first but it got in the way of how I use Feedly for reading Webcomics. My little red number was always in the 100s suddenly!

So I tried some readers out again and I landed on Feedbro for my social media needs. Feedbro is just browser extension, there’s no login, and it all runs off an OPML file which you can export at any time. It also doesn’t sync with my phone, which was perfect for me because it limits my social media scrolling to my computer. It’s very customizable in ways that I absolutely love! I made mine look like 2012 Tumblr which is really nostalgic for me and makes me feel like I’m back on the old web.

Y’all, I really like Feedbro.

It has six view types, I personally like the 1st option which shows the entire post in a long scroll view (again like tumblr).

There’s no following limit, you can follow as many RSS feeds as you want, I’m at 210 feeds myself.

Similar to Feedly it also comes with a little number icon you can have in your browser bar that shows how many unread posts you have, but clicking on it doesn’t take you to the poster’s site — it takes you to your Feedbro feed. This is why I don’t use it for webcomics. Turning on the “Show only unread articles” option makes it so once I get to to the bottom of my feed, once that little number reaches 0, I’m done! I can’t keep scrolling so I HAVE to go to draw some comics instead!! Of course your feeds will update throughout the day so it is tempting to click any time any number shows up.

Lastly, I really like the way ‘Rules’ work which are also highly customizable, I can filter certain words either within a post, within a title, or a post-author and have Feedbro auto delete those which is nice for if I want to avoid posts from certain people or say, I’m a bit squeamish so I’ve filtered out any kind of ‘gore’.

Not much is different than following webcomics here, I follow RSS feeds from Tumblr, Bluesky**, Mastodon, and artist’s websites and it collects all those posts into one big feed for me to read.

You’ll just be inputting that RSS URL into Feedbro, but Feedbro has a really cool feature where if you’re on, say, someone’s Tumblr — clicking on the browser icon in your toolbar, Feedbro can pull the feed for your right then and there using “Find Feeds in Current Tab”. Add it to a folder if you want and you’re done, this new feed can now be found when you open Feedbro.

When you follow a new feed, what I’ve found on Feedbro is that only the lastest 20 posts will appear in your feed, so you won’t be bogged down by the entire archive, don’t worry! This is also the case for following comics on Feedly, only a few recent posts will populate your reader.

Try out Feedbro’s “Find Feeds” option on any number of sites, like tumblr, bluesky**, mastodon, youtube, podcasts and y’know, most sites!

Now, I do also have an instagram folder in the slide here and it’s the only way I can see posts from instagram since I no longer have an account. Instagram doesn’t technically allow for RSS feeds but Feedbro tries to cobble one together for you if you try “Find Feeds in Current Tab”. Sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. And even then, the posts coming in from Instagram don’t always load in the feed, but Feedbro is trying it’s best!

**As of September 2025: Bluesky’s RSS feed is very barebones and doesn’t include images still

Which leads me to: Sites that don’t use RSS.

Most of the time if a site allows you to publish a post then it has an RSS feed, but some sites just don’t work that way or are aggressively against it.

Instagram is the best and biggest example for this, “BUT if you’re following folks on an RSS feed you won’t get ads, or posts from folks you don’t follow and we can’t allow that now can we?!” Twitter (or I mean X) has recently followed suit with this as well.

Galleries on sites also don’t work with RSS. When a gallery like this is updated the information is not sent to the RSS because it’s not a traditional post, so if you run a site be mindful of this. I have a gallery on my portfolio site for illustrations but I’m not worried about RSS on my portfolio, because I have RSS on my art blog instead, where every post on my art blog is a traditional post.

There are sometimes ways around this, like using Feedbro’s “find feeds” option, using RSS Bridge, or RSSHub to force an RSS for specific sites.

If you make and publish a webcomic, please please please have an RSS button somewhere on your site!

People do use RSS and you’ll be doing them a favour by having it loud and proud, but maybe you don’t know if you have an RSS? WordPress, Comicfury, and Tapas all have RSS by default. You may have to do the URL trick to see what URL your RSS is, and for convenience I’ve included the RSS URL structure for the sites I mentioned. WordPress uses /feed, Comicfury uses /RSS, and Tapas uses tapas.io/RSS/series/yourcomicID

Once you find it, I want you to follow your own feed! This ensures that you know it’s working properly. You don’t want a month of updates to fly by while your RSS was down, this means none of your readers got those updates! Follow it and try and get it fixed as soon as you can — though there’s not much that can go wrong luckily, I have had to contact my host a handful of times to fix some hosting issues which did effect my RSS but I follow all my own feeds so I know if they’ve gone down. It does take some time for feeds to update, so don’t worry if it’s been a few hours and your feed hasn’t updated.

I personally don’t have a Neocities but I know a lot of folks who do AND post their webcomics through it using Rarebit, which is such a great free webcomics option AND it’ll get you familiar with a bit of coding.

However Neocities does not have RSS enabled by default. Never fear! You can manually add an RSS feed to your Neocities site using this guide at rssguide.neocities.org — and if you use Rarebit for your webcomic, while I believe the previous link only works for standard Neocities sites, you can integrate an RSS feed with Rarebit by following the guide by Vivivi at vivivi.leprd.space/software/rarebit-rss — there’s always an option if RSS isn’t available!

For other sites it could be plugins or add-ons but if your site has posts then it can have an RSS.

I hope I’ve convinced you how great RSS is, I really do!

It’s a really powerful tool where you are in complete control, avoiding ads, bloat, posts you didn’t sign up to see, and not to mention not giving your personal data away. Let’s all avoid enshittification together!

I recently listened to episode 20 of the Dot Social Podcast featuring Cory Doctorow speaking about RSS, which was a big help in writing this talk, other folks running NIF events have mentioned Cory already and his coining of the phrase “enshittification” and I sincerely believe RSS is the way out, I believe RSS can save us from that.

I’ll end off with a quote from the episode “You are free of the bad decisions of the people you’re relying on, but also it means that they know it.”

Thank you for reading! And a big thank you to the Cartoonist Coop for giving me this opportunity to chat about RSS to you all.

This talk was recorded and is be available on the Cartoonist Coop’s youtube.

If you have any questions about RSS feel free to comment below or shoot me an email for anything more in-depth at jey@topazcomics.com