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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

Sorry for the random question, but I’ve been trying to get more into RSS, and figure it’s worth asking someone who has a lot of experience - is there a reliable way to find an RSS feed for a given site, assuming it has one? Or is it a set of heuristics you try?

Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?

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> is there a reliable way to find an RSS feed for a given site, assuming it has one?

Any half-decent feed reader app will do it for you after just pasting the website’s address.

> Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?

https://openrss.org

https://rss-bridge.org

https://createfeed.fivefilters.org

And for newsletters:

https://notifier.in

https://kill-the-newsletter.com

Awesome, thanks! Especially for the pointers to those rssifiers.

For the first question, I should clarify that I'm hoping to just ingest these RSS feeds myself in various scripts. But yeah, makes sense that most of the good feed readers mostly take care of that.

Websites usually link to their RSS feed using a <link> attribute in the head of the page.

Browsers used to detect this and show an RSS icon near the address bar if the website you were viewing had a feed - and you could click the icon to see more details and subscribe.

I use this Firefox addon which replicates that functionality: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/feed-preview/

FreshRSS is a good self-hosted RSS feed reader, and you can configure it to scrape non-RSS webpages for updates too: https://danq.me/2022/09/27/freshrss-xpath/

Great tip on the <link>, thanks a lot! Also the pointer to FreshRSS, I might end up running an instance of that in our basement.

I use RSSHub Radar which finds both native feeds and some RSS-ified feeds for websites that don't support it. https://github.com/DIYgod/RSSHub-Radar

Ah this is great, thanks!

With decent RSS apps, you can generally just paste in the URL of any page (or the site's homepage) and they will take care of examining the HTML to find the URL of the actual feed.

Google makes an extension for it - https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rss-subscription-ex...

You can link it to your reader so you just click the button and it adds the feed into it.

RSSHub radar to detect rss feeds. And you can write handlers for RSSHub to RSSify websites. Both open source.

I use Folo which has Rsshub built in. You simply search for a source you want, or add your own with a known URL for everyone to use. Otherwise you can use Rsshub with a reader of your choice.

Check the source code. Looks for "rss". If that returns too many hits then search for "application/rss+xml".

That's actually what I've been doing, but sites that very clearly should have an RSS feed (specifically, our local governments' event calendar pages), don't, so I thought there might be some other route/heuristic/whatever that I've been missing :-(.

Exactly the approach that I've been using for years. Manual, but works!

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