By Jason Snell
January 19, 2023 8:45 AM PT
Customizing the Six Colors RSS feed
Subscriber Josh wrote on Mastodon:
6C member here. Hopefully simple request: a RSS feed that does not include your regular podcasts, Upgrade, Clockwise, etc. I already subscribe to all those in Overcast, so they just clutter up NNW for me. Apologies if there is already a way to do this. I can’t find it if there is. 👍🏻
I had to think about this for a bit, but the answer is yes. If you’d like to modify your Six Colors RSS feed so that it only displays certain post types, you can do that. It’s all based on the categories we use for posts on the site. So please join me behind the curtain as I reveal them:
- Post – Regular posts (headlines are green on the site)
- Member – Members-only posts (purple)
- Link – Link posts (Blue)
- Offsite – Cross-promotional links, mostly to our Macworld columns (orange)
- Member Podcast – The Six Colors podcast
- Podcast – All those podcasts Member Josh is already subscribed to
- More Colors – Video content exclusively for More Colors level members
- Backstage – Content for members at the Backstage level
Each of you has your own, individual RSS feed in with a URL that looks like: sixcolors.com/?member-feed=[a very long string of characters]. If you append &category= to the end of that URL, your RSS feed will be filtered by category. (This is actually how the Six Colors Podcast feed is generated—it’s just the regular feed, filtered on the category “Member Podcast”.)
If you append a (comma-delimited, URL-encoded) list of categories to that URL, the feed will only display items in those categories. So, for example, Subscriber Josh might end up with an RSS URL that looks like this:
https://sixcolors.com/?member-feed=xxxx&category=Link,Post,Offsite,Member,More%20Colors,Feed%20Only
So yes, if you want to customize your RSS feed, you can. (If you do, I would strongly recommend keeping the Offsite category in your feed, for reasons I can’t yet reveal.)