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Alan Blockley
Published Apr 14, 2024
If you’re like me you like to be across all the news, all the time.  
There are a few key sources that I use to keep myself updated including:
Each one of these sources has a slightly differing type of content but each is just as important as the other. 
One of the most useful ways to follow these websites effectively, I find, is to utilise an RSS feed reader.  I always have Slack open so having my RSS feeds delivered to a Slack channel is very useful.
To achieve this we need two things:
  • RSS App enabled in Slack
  • An RSS Feed URL
The latter is sometimes hard to find as they’re not always publicised.  This isn’t intentional, it’s just sometimes not obvious to find. 
There are a few ways we can find this important URL though;
  1. Take a guess.  No really, just guess! You can often find that the platform under the blog/website is one of the popular Content Management systems, so you could always just try and append /RSS or /feed to the end of the root domain.  E.g. https://www.exampleblogsite.com/rss
  2. Look for the RSS logo, generally, this logo will be a link to the RSS feed. ​​
    RSS Icon
    RSS Icon
  3. Check the source - Sometimes a provider will publicise the RSS feed in the source as a <link> tag.  E.g. <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" …
Spoiler alert - Community.aws RSS feed is https://community.aws/rss

Setting up community.aws in Slack

Now that we have the prerequisites let’s get on with setting this up.
  1. Log into Slack (You’ll need to be a Workspace admin to do this). 
  2. Click on the drop-down for your workspace and then click Tools & Settings -> Manage Apps
  3. From the search bar, type RSS
  4. Click “Add to slack” to add the app. 
    Setup RSS App
    Setup RSS App
  5. Confirm this action by clicking “Add RSS integration”
  6. You’ll now be able to set up the RSS and connect it to your channel of choice.  Click “Subscribe to this feed” to confirm.
    Add RSS
    Add RSS
You’ll now see when a new article is added to the community.aws blog a Slack message informing you of the content.
The end result
The end result
Hopefully, you find this as useful as I did.
 

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