RSS Feeds

I’ve only recently—over the past couple months—started heavily using RSS feeds. Up until this point, I didn’t realize how convenient it was, despite it being RSS for Really Simple Syndication. It’s incredibly nice to simply open my phone and have it collate a multitude of sources into one place; in fact, I find myself checking my feed quite often.

So far I’ve subscribed to a couple journals and some blogs. Here’s a partial list:

• CDC MMWR
• Phase 3 and 4 clinical trials from:
  • BMJ
  • NEJM
  • The Lancet
• Blogs from:
  • Sensible Medicine
  • The Vajenda
  • The Anesthesia Consultant
  • Precious Bodily Fluids
  • Stop and Think
  • Vinay Prasad’s Observations and Thoughts
  • The Skeptical Cardiologist

There’s also a great resource from the NIH that walks you through how to set up filtered RSS feeds for pubmed: NIH RSS Feeds. This is how I got the feeds for phase 3 and above.

You can use an RSS feed locally, but I decided to run an RSS server using FreshRSS and package it with Docker (I wanted a server so that I could sync across devices). This runs on my PC at home. I then used Tailscale to access it from my other devices. It works beautifully.

I admit that I don’t understand half the things that these feeds are talking about—especially the clinical trials—but this provides for a good opportunity to look things up. Its also just a nice feeling to be able to talk about a paper and know that I can pull it up to immediately reference it.

I highly reccomend it for anyone who wants to stay up to date with their field of interest. The convenience of having everything in one place is unmatched.