NLJ RSS and Atom Feeds

The New Leaf Journal is a proponent of using RSS, ATOM, and JSON feeds for following interesting things from your favorite online sources on your own terms. For that reason, we not only offer RSS, ATOM, and JSON feeds for or articles, special post types, and newsletter, we also maintain a one-page New Leaf Journal aggregator site with its own feed. Below, I introduce all of our feeds and post some questions and answers.

Before continuing, I recognize that some readers may not be familiar with feeds or how to use feeds to follow websites. If you are in that camp, please see my brief introduction to feeds and feed readers.

Quick Navigation: Jump to main feed links, newsletter feed links, New Leaf Journal Feeds site links

(Update note: This version of our Feeds hub was published on May 12, 2023, after a major revision. See an archived version of the original Feeds Hub here.)

Main New Leaf Journal Feeds

We offer RSS, ATOM, and JSON feeds for everything that appears in The New Leaf Journal. All major feed readers support RSS and ATOM, so you will be fine with either of those feeds. JSON support is less common, but we invite you to use our JSON feeds as an alternative to RSS and ATOM if you use a feed reader that supports it.

NLJ Section + Base URL	RSS Feed	ATOM Feed	JSON Feed
Main Article Archive	Feed	Feed	Feed
Leaflet Posts	Feed	Feed	Feed
Leaf Bud Posts	Feed	Feed	Feed
Syndicated Newsletters	Feed	Feed	Feed

Our default feed is RSS 2.0. If you add /feed to the end of the URLs of our main site or special section, you will have the main feed. If you add /atom or /json to /feed, you can access our ATOM or JSON feed instead of RSS 2.0.

We also output RDF and RSS 0.92 feeds. You can find our RDF feeds by adding /feed/rdf to the target URL and RSS 0.92 by adding /feed/rss. See WordPress’s docs on default feed behavior here. The vast majority of users will be fine with our RSS and ATOM feeds (or JSON for those using supported readers). But the older formats are available for those who need or otherwise prefer them.

Separating Articles, Leaflets, and Leaf Buds

Our main site feed only includes our regular Articles. Leaflets and Leaf Buds are two custom post types for short posts (Leaflets are usually small articles while Leaf Buds are quips about an external link) are not included in the main feed, but each have their own feeds. If you want to make sure you receive all of our content, please make sure to add our main site feed along with the Leaflets feed and the Leaf Buds feed to your feed reader. You can find an idea of the types of shorter posts we publish as Leaflets and Leaf Buds by going through their archives or seeing their latest posts in the sidebar.

(I discuss our Letter post type in the Newsletter Leaf Journal subsection.)

MF2 and JF2 Post Feeds

The New Leaf Journal also supports two more niche formats: Microformats2 and JF2 Post. Most visitors will not be able to make use of these formats – but if you use something that can parse them, they are available. MF2 feeds are accessible by adding /feed/mf2 to a URL or /feed/jf2 to obtain the JF2 post feed.

Author, Category, and Tags Feeds

All of our categories and tags output the same feeds as our main Article, Leaflet, and Leaf Bud feeds. Authors also have feeds. [For the following examples, I will use our regular RSS 2.0 feeds (ending in ‘feed’), but note that you can also use ATOM, JSON, other RSS formats, or MF2/JF2 (see below).

The Emu Café is a category at The New Leaf Journal. The URL is: https://thenewleafjournal.com/category/the-emu-cafe/. If you wanted to specifically subscribe to The Emu Café, you would add /feed to the end of the URL or your preferred format (e.g. /feed/atom).

The same principle applies to tags and categories. We have a Pokémon tag. Its archive is available at: https://thenewleafjournal.com/tag/pokemon/. If you were interested specifically in our Pokémon-tagged articles, you could subscribe at https://thenewleafjournal.com/tag/pokemon/feed or your preferred format.

Authors also have feeds. If you were only interested in Victor V. Gurbo’s articles, for example, you could subscribe at https://thenewleafjournal.com/author/victorvgurbo/feed or in your preferred format.

In general, I recommend subscribing to our main feeds. We usually publish 4-6 articles per week and 5-7 short posts (output may vary), so it is unlikely that we will overwhelm your feed reader in the same way that a news site may with frequent, daily updates.

However, I previously explained in a New Leaf Journal article how I use category and author feeds on other sites to curate my reading experience. Some readers may have very particular New Leaf Journal interests. In those cases, readers could use a set of category and/or tag feeds to create a curated New Leaf Journal in their feed readers. I would recommend trying to avoid choosing tags and categories that may lead to too many duplicate posts in your feed reader (e.g., most of our posts with the Insani tag are in the Visual Novel Reviews category, and all Insani posts are in the broader Visual Novels category). I would also avoid categories or tags that are updated very infrequently for subscription purposes.

Note that there are some tools for bundling feeds. While I am not too familiar with the commercial feed reader service landscape, I know that RSS Bridge (self-hostable on your own server) can combine several feeds into one.

The Newsletter Leaf Journal is a sister publication of The New Leaf Journal. We use Buttondown to mail our newsletter every Saturday. While signing up by email would seem to be the obvious way to read our newsletter, our newsletter produces an RSS feed for those who prefer feeds over email (I would sign up via RSS). Moreover, I syndicate our Newsletter to a special New Leaf Journal post type every Monday. The only difference between the flagship Saturday newsletter and the syndicated version is usually a different introduction. See the feeds below:

If you are subscribing to the newsletter, I would generally recommend using the Buttondown RSS feed – unless you like reading the newsletter two days after it first goes out. The main reasons I syndicate the newsletter are to keep copies of it on The New Leaf Journal and to offer an additional way for visitors to discover it and consider subscribing. However, if you happen to prefer the syndicated version for whatever reason (perhaps it looks better in your feed reader of choice), its feeds are available.

Our single-page Osmosfeed website

I used GitHub pages to create a single-page website aggregating many New Leaf Journal and related feeds in one place.

See my article on the project.

I may eventually use a New Leaf Journal domain for the site, but as of the last update, you will find the site at: https://nafnlj.github.io/nljfeeds/. This site updates three times each day and collects all of our New Leaf Journal and Newsletter Leaf Journal posts as well as posts from other projects (e.g., my Mastodon, Pixelfed, and Hypothes.is accounts and Victor V. Gurbo’s YouTube music profile). You can see all of the feeds we use in the code repository.

If you love all of the content at NLJ Feeds, you can subscribe to it at https://nafnlj.github.io/nljfeeds/feed.atom as an alternative to subscribing to The New Leaf Journal directly. However, I will note that subscribing to The New Leaf Journal directly will ensure that new posts show up in your feed reader when they are published, whereas New Leaf Journal Feeds updates on a set schedule. I primarily created New Leaf Feeds for people who are not using feed readers, so I would still recommend subscribing to all of its feeds (or those you are interested in) individually. But different options work better for different people, so you can choose how to use feeds to follow our projects.

N.A. Ferrell Feeds

I keep a list of all of my sites, presences, and their associated feeds (where applicable) here at The New Leaf Journal. You can find it here.

Trying a Feed Reader

If you already use a feed reader and like your solution, I hope that you add some or all of our feeds to your collection (you have my gratitude if you already have done so). If you are interested in trying a feed reader or getting back into the feed reader habit (perhaps you dropped the habit after the untimely demise of Google Reader), there are many options available. There are paid feed reader services, entirely local feed readers (run on a single device), and self-hosted options. I personally use an open source local feed reader called Handy Reading for Android, and before that I had used a local syncing option based on DecSync.

Below, I will list free and open source feed readers for different platforms for your consideration. Note that these are not necessarily recommendations – I have only personally tried a small number – but they are options for you to consider. My only criteria for the list is that the feed reader must be free of cost and open source. If you want to see more options, including commercial services, I recommend starting with AlternativeTo.

Akregator (Linux-only, part of the KDE suite)
Claws Mail (mail client with RSS plugin support)
DecSync-based readers (Linux, Android) [see article]
Feeder (Android-only, cross-device syncing enabled)
Fluent Reader (cross-platform electron app)
Handy Reading (Android)
Lifrea (quintessential desktop reader for Linux and BSD)
Newsboat (cross-platform CLI reader)
NewsFlash (GTK-based desktop reader for Linux)
NetNewsWire (open source news reader for MacOS and iOS)
Pétrolette (web-based reader which uses local storage, self-hostable)
QuiteRSS (cross-platform desktop reader)
Raven Reader (cross-platform electron-based reader with full text support)
RSS Guard (cross-platform desktop reader)
Smart-RSS (browser extension feed reader for Chromium- and Firefox-based browsers with traditional UI)
Thunderbird (cross-platform email client with news reader support)
Vienna (MacOS desktop news reader)

Questions?

If you have any questions about our feeds or feeds in general (including error reports), feel free to send an email using my address on our Contact Page.