BBC News RSS Feeds (that don't suck!)

The Feeds

You can find all the feeds at https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev/

What is this?

BBC News provides a variety of RSS feeds for subscribing to news content. But they're not great, so I've been working on improving them:

1. In 2019, sick of seeing sports news (that I didn't care about), I started filtering out sports.
2. In 2024, the feed started being polluted by non-news content (links to iPlayer and BBC Sounds content, and plugs for the app). So I came up with a filter for them too.
3. In 2025, a commenter asked if I could make an alternate version of the feed that didn't exclude the sports news, so I arranged for that too.
4. Finally, when somebody asked on Mastodon whether I could start filtering not only the UK edition but also the World edition of BBC News... I realised it was time to turn this into a proper project.

How does it work?

If you want to run it for yourself:

1. Check out this codebase.
2. Using Ruby 3.3.4 or later, run bundle install to install dependencies.
3. Run ruby ./pull-feeds.rb.
4. The resulting feeds can be found in build/.

Set up step 3 on a cron job every ~20 minutes or so, and you're all set.

.github/workflows/deploy.yaml defines the above process as a Github Action. If you're copying this for your own Github Pages repo, you'll need to change the domain name in pull-feeds.rb and .github/workflows/deploy.yaml to your own.

License

This project is released under The Unlicense. See LICENSE for more information, but the tl;dr: is that you can do whatever you want with this code, without any restrictions.