Hacker News Reader

Comment by grahamjpark | Hacker News Reader

I’ve found that many sites these days have an RSS feed, but don’t advertise it. I’ll come across a site with no mention of it, and then just start trying urls to see if any work. For example:

/feed

/blog/rss

/rss.xml

I wager whatever content management system they’re using automatically creates it.

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View source and search for "link"

Browsers used to put a RSS button front and center when this link appeared in a body. I'm grateful the link is still often embedded even as there's less motivation to do so.

Many RSS readers will just find this link tag, so often you don't need view source, they'll do this step for you.

NetNewsWire will scan for those and find them for you. NetNewsWire has a Share extension that you can use directly from Safari or most any app that supports sharing a URL. The Share extension hands the URL off to the main NetNewsWire app that will try a series of common RSS feed locations if it can't find it as an alt link in the page source.

There are Firefox extensions that do this automatically, giving you that convenient RSS icon beside the URL, that you may then use to either read the feed directly in Firefox or copy-paste into your feed reader of choice.

Livemarks - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/

Want my RSS - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

Easy to RSS - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/easy-to-rss/

There may be Chromium alternatives too but I don't use Chromium.

Normally you can just throw the site into your reader and it will find that link automatically. So you don't have to worry about that stuff.

Yeah, I found that too, when I was building my Really Social Sites module for Hey Homepage (a DIY website system). I think we have to mostly thank WordPress for all the existing - but unadvertised - feeds!

Does the Google RSS Subscription extension do this kind of detection? If not, this would be good to add.

I regularly email site-admins/support-staff when I come across that, along with the actual text of a `<link />` tag. Just about every time they come through!

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