Can’t Keep Up With Open-Source Software Updates? Here’s How I Do It

There are many excellent free and open-source software projects, but keeping up with all of them can be difficult, especially when they don't have blogs or other traditional communication channels. Thankfully, you can still keep track of most software projects in one simple feed, thanks to some hidden features and the magic of RSS.

Part of my work here as News Editor at How-To Geek is monitoring hundreds of software projects for interesting updates and changes. Those changes can often turn into news articles, like our coverage of game emulators and self-hosted apps , or serve as inspiration for guides and editorials. Unfortunately, some of those projects don't have blogs, social media accounts, or other easy ways for me to keep track of them, but there are workarounds.

First, Get an RSS Reader

The core component to this setup is an RSS reader . You may have used an RSS reader for keeping track of news, blogs, and podcasts, but they are also excellent tools for monitoring software projects. Even if a given project doesn't have a full blog with a working RSS feed, one of its software repositories or social media accounts might provide a feed.

Note: RSS feeds and Atom feeds are different technologies, but most RSS readers are compatible with both formats, so I'll be using RSS and Atom interchangeably for this guide.

If you don't already have an RSS reader, I recommend starting with Feedly or Inoreader , which can synchronize your feeds and which items you've read across multiple devices. There are also many RSS clients for desktop and mobile platforms, some of which can run entirely on your local device, and some that connect to cloud services. I use the Reeder app on my Mac, for example. Most RSS services and clients can import and export your feeds with OPML files , so if you want to move to another reader in the future, the process is only a few clicks.

Once your RSS reader is ready, you can start adding feeds for software projects. For example, in the Feedly web app, you just click 'Follow Sources' in the sidebar and paste the RSS feed URL.

You can organize your feeds into different folders. I have all of my software feeds in one folder, but you might want to sort them by platform or category, like grouping together all emulators.

Adding Blogs

First, some software projects have dedicated blogs with functioning RSS feeds. I'll use the Dolphin Emulator as an example. Dolphin has a blog hosted at this web address:

If you paste that into some RSS readers, they will automatically find the RSS feed in the page's HTML source code . If that doesn't work, you may have to provide the direct RSS feed link, which in Dolphin's case is this:

Some blogs, like the Dolphin project's blog, have an RSS button that directly links to the feed—you just copy the link and paste it into your reader. The button is usually an icon of a dot with two curved lines expanding outwards, sometimes with an orange color.

If you still can't find the feed, and your RSS reader can't find it, it might still be in the page source code. With the blog open in your browser, right-click an empty spot and select the option to view the page source.

Next, open the 'Find in page' tool, which is usually the Ctrl+F or Cmd+F keyboard shortcut, and search for "alternate" in the page. If you see a link tag with "atom" or "rss" as the type, that should be an RSS feed link.

The extra step of digging through HTML code is certainly annoying, but it shouldn't be necessary with most sites and reader apps.

Adding GitHub Feeds

If a software project is hosted on GitHub, or it has an official mirror on GitHub, you can track it with various RSS feeds. If you replace "repo" with the repository name and "user" with the GitHub account that owns the repository, you can add this RSS feed to track releases:

This one tracks all commits to a repository:

This one tracks all new tags, which some projects use alongside or instead of releases:

This one tracks all activity from a given user across all (public) repositories, like commits, pull requests, and issue comments:

Time for some examples. The Calibre ebook manager uses GitHub for its code repository , and new versions are set up properly as releases on GitHub . That means I can track new releases with this feed:

Meanwhile, the Dolphin emulator repository doesn't use the releases feature on GitHub, but it does create new tags for each release. If you wanted to know when a new release was available or coming soon, you would have to add the tags feed:

What if a software project doesn't use releases or tags, and the regular commit feed is too noisy? You can still set up a feed that monitors changes to one file in a repository. For example, Calibre has a changelog text file that is updated for each release. If you want a feed for changes to that specific file, you would open it on GitHub, then click the History button.

This takes you to the file's commit history, with this URL:

To get an RSS feed of that history, just add ".atom" to the end like this:

Most projects use the tags or releases feature for new versions, but if you want to monitor changes outside of new releases, the commit feeds are helpful.

Adding GitLab Feeds

If a project is hosted on a GitLab repository, you get many of the same RSS features as GitHub. However, GitLab is helpful enough to provide RSS buttons, so you don't have to craft your own feed URLs. For example, if you visit the repository for the Freedesktop SDK , the releases and tags pages both have RSS buttons at the top-right corner of the page.

You just copy and paste that URL into your RSS reader, and you're done. As with GitHub projects, some repositories use releases and tags for new versions, some only use tags, and a few don't use either one.

Adding SourceForce Feeds

SourceForge isn't as popular today as it once was, but it also has great RSS feed support. Using the 7-Zip repository as an example, you can find RSS button links on the sections for Project Activity, News, Wiki, and Files.

Just like GitLab, the RSS links are clearly visible on each page, so you don't have to go digging for them. GitHub, take notes.

Adding Bluesky and Mastodon Feeds

Even though Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, and other social media platforms don't provide RSS feeds for individual accounts, it is an option with Bluesky and Mastodon. If a given software project (or one of the main developers) has an account on Bluesky or Mastodon, this can be a great way to keep track of news and upcoming events.

For a Bluesky account, you just need the URL to the profile, then add "/rss" to the end. For example, the Blender project's profile has this web address:

The RSS feed for that profile looks like this:

For Mastodon, you just add .rss to the end of a profile URL. Here's the profile page for the Blender project on the mastodon.social server:

The RSS feed looks like this:

If a software project has accounts on both sites, you might want to consider adding both. That might give you duplicate posts in your reader, but if one account stops working or is deleted, you'll still get posts from the other one. This is especially important for Mastodon profiles—if the account moves from one server to another , your feed won't be migrated automatically.

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These are most of the ways I track updates and general news for software projects, even if they don't have a functioning blog or other communication channels. These tips don't cover every imaginable scenario, like projects that only communicate through Discord channels, but they have helped me keep an eye on hundreds of projects from one feed.