Category: Lifestyle

You already follow your favorite blogs, news sites, research journals, and more in Feedly. But when you come upon a site without an RSS option, what do you do? Manually opening separate tabs and remembering to check the RSS-less sites can get tedious and confusing. And some of the RSS builder tools out there can feel intimidating and complicated, especially if you already do all your reading and research inside Feedly.

That’s why we’re so excited to announce Feedly’s new RSS Builder. You can now create your own feeds for websites that don’t offer RSS and follow them in Feedly.

When a website doesn’t offer an RSS feed, you’ll automatically get the option to build your own RSS feed in Feedly.

Choose the articles you want to get in Feedly

When you try to follow a website that doesn’t offer RSS, you used to hit a dead end. Now, you’ll see the option to build your own RSS feed, and the RSS Builder will walk you through the simple steps to add a website without RSS to your Feedly.

First, choose the articles you want to get through RSS. When you open the RSS builder, you’ll get a preview of the web page. Scroll down the page, find the section of articles you’re interested in, and click on the articles you want to get in Feedly (such as the “latest posts” section of a company’s blog). Then, click ‘Build RSS feed.’ You’ll be prompted to add your new source to an existing Feed in Feedly. Add it to an existing Feed, or create a new Feed in which to organize your new source.

That’s it! You have officially built an RSS feed from scratch. Congrats.

 In the preview of the website, select the articles you want to get in Feedly. In this example, we selected articles from Fintastico’s Fintech Radar blog.

Feedly continuously updates your new RSS source

Articles from this new source (that you’ve created with the RSS Builder) will now get sent to your Feedly regularly. This source will behave like any other source in Feedly. Feedly AI will find the topics in article, deduplicate articles, summarize articles, or mute topics you don’t want to get in Feedly. 

Your shiny new source in Feedly! Articles from this new source will appear in your Feedly just like any other blog, website, or news source.

Easily read, annotate, or save articles from this RSS source

Now that you’ve used the RSS Builder to bring these articles into Feedly, you can read, annotate, save, or share articles just like content from any other source. Add Notes or Highlights to your reading to come back to later, or save an article to a designated Board to keep articles on a certain topic. You can share through integrations with social media sharing platforms, email, or Zapier. 

Add Notes, Highlights, or tag teammates (if you’re on an Enterprise plan) like any other article in Feedly.

FAQs about building RSS feeds for websites without RSS

Do you have a set of go-to-sources, boards, or AI Feeds you navigate to regularly? You can now use the heart icon to pin them to the top of the left navigation bar and access them more quickly.

Right-click on any Feed, Source, Web Alert or Board to add it to your Favorites section.

If you were using the old favorites system, you should see a Favorites (Old) feed with the list of sources you added to your favorites. If you want to rename Favorites (Old) to a different name, please create a new feed and move the sources to that feed.

We are also adding a preference that allow you to use your first feed as your start page. This should allow you to continue to use your old favorites as your start page if that is your workflow.

However you choose to organize your Feedly, we want to make it easy to find what matters as fast as possible!

Finding and collecting relevant indicators of compromise is critical to your security, but with millions of articles to sort through, discovering and collecting the right ones is a challenge. Even if you know where to look, IoCs can be easy to miss and tedious to upload to your threat intelligence platform.

This is why we’re excited to announce that now you can discover, collect, and export malicious IPs, domains, hashes, and URLs mentioned in your Feeds or across the web, because Feedly AI recognizes indicators of compromise.

We trained Feedly AI to understand, find, and even export IoCs, so that they are easier to find and prioritize. This feature is included with Feedly for Cybersecurity. 

Collect IoCs from across the entire web

Feedly AI recognizes malicious IPs, domains, hashes, and URLs within the text of articles, Tweets, or Reddit posts, and tags articles so you know how many and what type of IoCs appear in a given article. 

When an article contains an IoC, Feedly AI will highlight it for you so it’s easy for you to find and confirm, even if it is buried in the text of a long article or threat intelligence report. 

If the IoCs are relevant, you can  export them to a markdown or STIX file that will include critical context such as the article link, malware, threat actor, CVE, product, and TTP information. 

To track indicators of compromise from across the entire web, click the robot symbol on the left hand navigation menu, and navigate to the ‘Threat Intel” tab. Type “Indicators of Compromise,” then click “+ AND” to refine your AI Feed further if needed.

Track IOCs with Feedly AI

Find IoCs related to a specific threat actor or malware

Let’s say you want to search for indicators of compromise related to a specific threat actor or malware. You can use AI Feeds to flag IoCs that match your query, even if the articles are from sources you don’t specifically follow.

The AI Feed shown in the example below will look for IoCs related to the Cobalt Strike malware family, making it easy to find what’s relevant, export it in seconds, and proactively monitor the web for future IoCs relevant to you. 

Find and export IoCs and their context

When you open article(s) that contain IoCs you’d like to upload to your preferred threat intelligence platform, you can export them in either STIX or Markdown formats. This is a significant time saver in contrast to scrolling through the article and copying and pasting what you need.

Your export will also include the IoC context such as the original article link, related malware, threat actor, CVE, product, and TTP information. This makes it even easier to take action. Here is an example of a STIX export:

Automate your IoC collection process with the Feedly API

The Advanced Feedly for Cybersecurity plan includes up to 100,000 requests per month and the full power of the Feedly API. Any action a user is taking in the Feedly application can be performed via the Feedly API, including collecting IoCs. You can access instructions for doing so here.

You can use the Feedly API to aggregate indicators of compromise and their context (associated threat actors, malwares, vulnerabilities and TTPs) from recent articles in a Feed, and return a single STIX object with all of those components and their relationships. 

To learn more about the power of the Feedly API or begin a trial or proof of context, click here.

Find relevant IoCs previously published online

Finally, if you need to search for a specific set of IoCs already published online, you can do this via Power Search. Power Search allows you to leverage Feedly AI’s knowledge graph within your existing Feeds or across the web, allowing you to get much more granular and accurate than standard web searches. 

Click the “” icon in the left navigation menu to access the Power Search screen. From here, you can look for any articles that contain indicators of compromise. This is ideal when you need to track a malware family you haven’t tracked before, and want to quickly find known IoCs that are already available online.

The Indicators of Compromise feature, CVE dashboard, cyber attacks Smart Topic, and several more advanced features are included with Feedly for Cybersecurity. This enterprise package is perfect for cybersecurity teams that need to conduct open-source threat intelligence more efficiently. To learn more about any of these features, or start a free 30-day trial, click the link below.

One Feedly Enterprise customer had come up with a clever trick to automatically email articles to a predefined group of 6 emails. It worked, but it was a little hacky. 

For teams that need to send critical information as quickly as possible (like the cyber threat intelligence teams that use Feedly, for example), instant communication about threats, data breaches, or vulnerabilities is important. And copying and pasting content at scale can really slow you down.

Remi, Customer Success & Operations lead at Feedly, helped one team find an even simpler way for instantly sending articles to external recipients.

They needed to send news immediately to external customers, but the customers weren’t members of their Feedly account. 

To avoid manually sending emails to customers each time a relevant article popped up, the team set up an IFTTT automation. It worked, but it was a little clunky:

They created an email address specifically for this purpose: ourteam123@gmail.com If an article was saved to a designated Board, then it would be sent to this predefined Gmail address via IFTTTThen, from that Gmail, IFTTT will trigger sending the email to a predetermined list of six recipients

And since the articles were sent from Feedly → Gmail → each recipient’s inbox, they weren’t the most visually pleasing.

A better (easier) way to immediately send articles to external recipients

Remi spotted an opportunity to make their lives easier, and helped simplify the workaround. It’s simple:

Highlight a section of the article you want to shareThen, leave a Note on the article with the person’s email address: +coworker@email.com

When you tag someone in the Notes section of an article, Feedly automatically sends an email to the recipient, and include the highlighted section in the body of the email. The look and feel of the email is a bit more polished than the Gmail workaround, and they don’t even have to click through to read the highlighted section of the article.

Instantly send articles from Feedly to lists of recipients 

Easy enough so far, right? But what happens when you want to send articles to the same list of six or seven people? You definitely don’t want to have to type their email addresses every single time.

Here’s the fun part: you can use tools like TextExpander to create keyboard shortcuts for your predetermined lists of email addresses, and paste that directly into Feedly. For example, if I often send articles to the same 7 external clients, I can create a snippet to avoid typing out those 7 email addresses every time I want to share something with a group.

Then, if someone replies to the email, it will automatically get sent to the original sender’s inbox (and not some noreply address). 

Try it out the next time you need to share a timely, relevant article. Happy reading!

This Feedly for Biopharma client has graciously allowed us to share their story on the condition of anonymity. Client names have been changed.

THE CHALLENGE

Discovering and organizing open-source biopharma research in one place

Sienna is a Knowledge and Insights Advisor at a top 10 pharmaceutical company in Australia. Sienna and her team are responsible for two main tasks: responding to specific, timely questions from doctors or researchers across the company, and proactively keeping employees up-to-date on industry developments or innovations. 

Responding to specific, timely questions 

Doctors and researchers might ask Sienna’s team whether a particular drug was ever linked to an adverse event, like “Has amoxycillin ever caused encephalitis?” Or they might answer questions about new drug delivery platforms, like “How do you get our large molecule drug inside the cell so that it can actually get to the target, where it will do the work of curing the disease?” For questions like these, Sienna and her team seek information to compile resource lists or reports. 

Sending out regular briefings to keep everyone informed

The second part of the job is proactively keeping people across the company up to date on drug developments, political decisions, and any other industry developments or innovations. Sienna and her team send out 50 different newsletters about relevant biopharma news every week to 765 recipients, plus a daily COVID newsletter: “We try to keep people informed of the most interesting published research in their areas.” 

Struggling to gather intelligence on broad topics 

For certain queries, Sienna and her team get their information from published literature in research journals, like PubMed.  However, Sienna remembers how tricky things got when her team started getting requests for information about broader topics like drug innovations, regulatory decisions, political decisions, or industry updates. “Rather than being about a specific disease, we started getting asked about things like drug pricing, or the gene and cell therapy industry.” Sienna commented that it wasn’t easy to capture this type of news about “those more general areas where there is news, rather than just published literature.”

She set up some Google Alerts, and subscribed to emails from assorted websites, but it was messy. And if members of the team weren’t already experts in an area (like bioprocessing, for example), Sienna found it hard to know which sources to look at for relevant research. 

Sienna and her team needed a way to ​track dozens of different topics and trends in biopharma at the same time from a large range of sources.

THE SOLUTION

Using Feedly AI to track industry updates, innovations, and regulatory news

Back in 2013, Sienna knew she needed an RSS reader replacement to gather industry updates. At the time, she was using a free, personal Feedly account to read comics in her spare time, and quickly realized she could use the same tool to keep up with the biopharma industry. 

Feedly AI reads through a pre-curated list of 3,000 top-tier biopharma publications: research journals, industry updates, regulatory news, PubMed, etc and surfaces content on the specific topics Sienna has selected. 
Now, Sienna and her team use Feedly for Biopharma plus the power of AI to track and gather information across the topics they need.

Tracking molecules, drugs, and clinical trials with AI Feeds

Finding relevant insights about a specific molecule or drug used to be like finding a needle in a haystack. But with Feedly AI, Sienna can now easily discover hyper-specific information about the drugs and clinical trials they need to keep up with. 

To replace noisy Google Alerts, Sienna created AI Feeds in Feedly, which allow her to track anything across the web (not just in sources she follows in Feedly), like specific genes, molecules, diseases, or clinical trials. Instead of skimming multiple email updates per day like she had to with Google Alerts, Sienna can refine her a AI Feeds for her specific needs and see results in a single Feed.

Sienna tracks regulatory changes related to Epilepsy and Scleroderma with AI Feeds. Feedly AI knows 5,000 diseases referenced in PubMed, NCBI, and MeSH so it can differentiate the disease names from a simple keyword.

For example, Sienna created an AI Feed for bioprocessing, a topic she was unfamiliar with. By asking Feedly AI to find articles about bioprocessing across the web, she didn’t need to know what the best sources of information were, but she could still get relevant insights about the topic. And as she continues to familiarize herself with the topic, she’s able to refine her bioprocessing AI Feeds to get even better results.

Sienna asked Feedly AI to track bioprocessing across the web.

AI Feeds like Sienna’s bioprocessing alert, allow her to keep track of news from sources she wouldn’t have found before. “And they’re so much less noisy than Google Alerts.”

Prioritizing top reads across favorite biopharma sources 

For topics Sienna and her team are a bit more familiar with, they already know their favorite sources to seek out information: news sites, research publications, and industry publications. They added all of these sources to Feedly, and asked Feedly AI to prioritize must-reads about drug manufacturers, lists of specific drugs, or specific topics like CRISPR. 

The team also adds Mute Filters to filter out the noise for certain topics. For example, in their Process Analytical Technology Innovation Feed, they’ve muted market reports, sports, and recreational drugs so they don’t get distracted by irrelevant results.

Asking Feedly AI to find similar articles to previously saved content

Since the team is already spending hours reading articles and saving them to Boards, they leverage their curation efforts with Like Boards. “We save things to boards to train Feedly AI,” explains Sienna. Like Boards are a niche feature that this team uses heavily. While we at Feedly pre-train Feedly AI on broad topics, Like Boards are an easy way for users to train Feedly AI to prioritize based on the content they’ve saved to Boards. Instead of surfacing articles about a specific topic, Feedly AI will find articles that share commonalities with what you’ve already saved.

Sienna saves articles to a Board to read later, share with team members, or train Feedly AI to prioritize types of articles you tend to save on a topic, like biopharma breakthroughs.

When Sienna and her team create a Like Board Priority, Feedly AI learns the types of articles they save, and then prioritizes similar articles in their Feeds.

THE RESULTS

A streamlined way to share critical information with hundreds across the company

With the information they gather in Feedly, Sienna and her team spend less than an hour per day to assemble informative weekly newsletters for 765 recipients. And instead of fielding multiple emails and alerts, they enjoy the peace of mind of getting all their open-source biopharma intelligence in a single location inside Feedly. 

By using AI Feeds, Priorities, and Like Boards inside Feedly, Sienna’s team can keep track of industry news and get insights from sources they might have missed with their limited time.

Now that Sienna and her team have the information gathering process down to a science, she’s excited to explore other functionalities, like saving articles to Boards as a way of sharing with the team and broader company.

And beyond biopharma research? Sienna takes full advantage of the ability to save articles to personal boards, invisible to her team. She has a dedicated Board in Feedly for recipes

For more inspiration on using Feedly for personal use, see how one tech executive uses Feedly to fuel his passion project. 

Back in 2020, it wasn’t hard to find information about the SolarWinds breach. In fact, the problem for cybersecurity analysts like Drew Gallis was the deafening noise of commentary about the breach. In a time of crisis, sites like New York Times and other editorial sources tend to drown out actionable technical information from security-specific sources. 

Drew is a cybersecurity analyst at WillowTree, a digital product consultancy with clients including HBO, Domino’s, Anheuser-Busch InBev, FOX Sports and Hilton. He’s part of a small security team responsible for incident response, incident remediation, reporting on security news, and securing web and mobile applications. Given the limited amount of time he has for monitoring threat intelligence, Drew needed a way to separate critical technical updates from useless news commentary around the SolarWinds attack.

Finding actionable technical insights amid the noise of the attack

“A lot of news organizations just point fingers at different companies, without actually providing any technical backing as to why they’re saying these things,” says Drew. He needed to find useful, actionable information he could leverage to equip his company with the facts they needed to protect themselves and their clients from breaches related to SolarWinds. 

Drew and the cybersecurity team at WillowTree leaned heavily on their Feedly setup to monitor security news during the SolarWinds attack. In the article he published about the breach, Drew writes, “Feedly allows us to leverage and utilize Feedly AI, which can sort and aggregate our “feeds” by filters which narrows down on key indicators such as organization breaches, critical CVEs, vendor releases, system vulnerabilities, new security tooling, etc.”

Using Feedly AI to eliminate false information and gather IoCs

Drew used Feedly AI to quickly eliminate false information which was abundant on the topic, such as accusations of Russian-owned company TeamCity. He was also able to gather any indicators of compromise (IoCs) on the issue, such as logs, data, and statistics. 

By gathering threat intelligence during the SolarWinds attack, Drew and his team were able to hand off actionable reports to developers and project managers to help WillowTree’s clients proactively protect against breaches. He says “I use Feedly to consolidate information and quickly generate actionable documentation and reports that we can then share with our clients. For SolarWinds, I was giving our clients indicators of compromise and different domains associated with the actual breach so they could better protect themselves.” 

Drew uses the information he finds in Feedly to make sure he’s not only educating clients about indicators of compromise and proofs of concept related to SolarWinds, but also helping them protect themselves during future attacks. 

WillowTree uses Feedly for Cybersecurity to separate the actionable insights from the noisy commentary. To learn more about using Feedly for threat intelligence, read the full case study about WillowTree’s setup.