The Gothic Studies RSS Starter Pack

Last week I wrote about the idea of copying Bluesky’s concept of “Starter Packs” to create a "British Weird" starter pack for RSS feeds (rather than Bluesky accounts), along with instructions of how to set up a free RSS Feed Reader account, and how to import the starter pack. You can find all of that at The British Weird RSS Starter Pack.

I’ve now just put together a “Gothic Studies” RSS Starter Pack to go alongside the British Weird one, which pulls together the RSS feeds for various academic journals (Gothic Studies, Gothic Nature Journal, Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, etc), feeds from relevant societies and websites (the International Gothic Association, Sheffield Gothic, “Open Graves, Open Minds” etc) and the feeds from some academic researchers of the Gothic.

As you see, the Gothic Studies Starter Pack skews towards academic researchers, scholarly journals, and societies and websites related to Gothic Studies.

The British Weird Starter Pack leans more towards feeds from practitioners (such as myself, Justin Hopper, Mat Pringle, ), groups (such as Folk Horror Revival), and independent writers and researchers about the Weird (such as Adam Scovell, Bob Fischer, Stephen Prince etc) whose work often intersects with the Gothic, but is more correctly characterised as being about “the Weird”.

There’s nothing stopping you from following the people on both the Gothic Studies Starter Pack and the British Weird starter pack.

If you already have an RSS/Feed Reader you can skip to the Importing the Gothic Studies RSS Starter Pack section, below.

If you don’t have an RSS/Feed Reader and would like some simple guidance on getting one set up (for free) then please follow the instructions on The British Weird RSS Starter Pack blog post then come back here when you’re done.

Importing the Gothic Studies RSS Starter Pack

Once you’ve created an account on a Feed Reader app, you can import the starter pack:

1. Download the Gothic Studies Starter Pack file here
2. (Optionally you can also Download the British Weird Starter Pack file here)
3. Upload the file to your feed reader of choice:
   • If you’re using Inoreader go to https://www.inoreader.com/opml_import and import it.
   • If you’re using Feedly go to https://feedly.com/i/cortex and import it.
   • If you’ve chosen to use a different feed reader then you need to look for a link that says “Import Feeds”, “Upload OPML”, or something along those lines.

When the starter pack has been imported you’ll see a number of new website feeds in your feed reader, and probably a lot of posts from each one (because your feed reader will have fetched all the latest posts from each website). Typically updates are less frequent than on social media - for example, I tend to post three or four blog posts per month.

Each post from each website will display the title, text, and any images etc within your feed reader. Most feed readers also allow you to click through to read the post on the originating website if you want. Sometimes you’ll have to do this because some RSS feeds only show the first few lines from a new post.

Why isn’t [insert name] included?

Probable reasons include:

1. They don’t have a website,
2. They have a website but, it doesn’t have an RSS feed,
3. I didn’t know about them - please send me their website URL and details through my contact form or via Bluesky or Mastodon.

My intention is that the Gothic Studies Starter Pack is narrowly-focused on academic Gothic Studies, not related or overlapping subject areas, so please don’t suggest something which only occasionally posts on-topic (for example, I didn’t include this blog — my own blog! — because I only occasionally post about my artwork’s relationship with the Gothic).