For the last few years I’ve been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content, non-news content, and (optionally) sports news.
This weekend, for the first time, somebody asked if it could produce an edition that included only the sports content. Which turned out to be slightly more difficult, because it’s the kind of scope-creep that my “uninterested-in-sports-news” brain couldn’t conceive that anybody would want! But I got there in the end.
If anybody’s looking for their fill of “BBC News Feeds… But Better!”, give it a look.
neat. building your own feed is very cool. i literally never considered _filtering out things from an rss feed_ that I may not care to read. That is inspiring.
Ooh, didn’t know about this. Lovely.
I’ll take the sans-sport.
Ohh, neat. Ever since the AI-ification of everything I’ve thought that that was the *one* feature I’d actually like to have: Detect whether this “news” item is about a professional ball player slightly changing their contractual details and then not bother me with it.
first thing I do with any newspaper sports section is discard it.
Can you do one without the BBC news? for those not keeping up, their Newsroom and other parts of the BBC have been heavily criticised for anti Semitic bias in their reporting of the Israel-Hamas conflict amongst other things.. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_BBC_editorial_bias_allegations
Their website tags the conflict as an Israel-Gaza war, its not, it never was.
Hi Dan, excuse the unsolicited message. I just came across your customised RSS feeds for the BBC. Nicely done!
Is there any chance you could look at doing a similar operation on the BBC technology feed, but (here’s the challenge) removing the posts from the regular BBC feed? I’m asking as a lot of the regular BBC RSS posts seem to be duplicated in it which drives me nuts :)
Feed free to tell me to bugger off, but I thought it might be of interest to you :)
Interesting idea! Too much of a technical lift for right now, but I’ve added the BBC Technology feed to the site (which at least will save you from within-feed duplicates, just not cross-feed ones; although it might make it easier for your RSS reader to detect such duplicates?).
I actually find myself wondering if a generic “RSS feed operations” proxy service might be useful, to e.g. combine (AND) the items in two feeds, form a feed of uniques (OR), remove items found in a different feed (NOT: this is what you’re looking for), etc. It’d be able to use guids, link URLs, or both. It’s not a terrible idea, right?
the filtering that I would wish for is one that removes all AI sourced and based on disinformation
Sounds like a great feature. Sadly, doing so in a way that’s remotely reliable would need AI-generated content to be, y’know, tagged as AI-generated.
Some kind of “evil bit” for RSS, I guess.
Hi, thanks for coming back to me so quickly. Appreciated.
I’d be more than happy to take a General & Tech RSS feed deduplicated and with no sports. That’d work out wonderfully awesome for me :)
Play nicely ands I’m very happy to test out if needed :)