Since the death of Google Reader, I have been a user of Feedly.  I like it enough that I am a paying customer.  That said, I am always on the lookout for way to consume RSS in novel ways.

To support my retro blog, I started a Slack channel mainly for blog contributors.  It is a fun little community, that allows me to keep in touch, but also lets me play with Slack.

Recently while looking to leave feedback for Slack, I began typing in the slack command /feedback.  When I got to /feed I noticed that an option came up for adding RSS feeds to a channel.

You can try it out yourself by entering these commands into any Slack Channel.

/feed help
/feed list
/feed subscribe
/feed remove

help will pull up this list if you need help.

list will give you a list of the feeds you have subscribed to in that channel. All feeds in this list will also have an ID number.  You use that ID number when you want to remove a feed.

subscribe will subscribe you to a channel if you enter a feed after your command.  So to subscribe to the Crazy Third Option you would simply type:

/feed subscribe https://www.crazythirdoption.com/feed/

remove will take a feed out of a channel.  First you will need to /list your feeds and get the ID Number for the feed you want to remove.  Once you have that you would type:

/feed remove [ID Number]

At first I thought I would just make a fun stream of news for just myself. I did this by adding feeds to my direct message channel in Slack.   You get there by clicking you own name in the name list on the left side of your Slack.  It worked and was fun.

After that, I started adding feeds to the public channels.  This allows me to share what I think are useful retro blogs and podcast feeds with the entire team.  With my retro blog, it is largely entertainment feeds, but you could use this to educate or as an alert.

For example, if you run sites that use WordPress, you might want to subscribe to their security alerts by typing:

/feed subscribe https://wordpress.org/news/category/security/feed/

I would caution to use restraint, you don’t want to flood a Slack channel with too much noise and drown out people.  So look for sites that do not update more than once an hour. You just want to add enough add a little life to a channel.

RSS is a great bit of technology, it gives you control of how you want to distribute information.  So when the option presents itself take advantage of it.