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Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

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Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#2
I generally try: /rss, /feed, /index.xml, /rss.xml, /feed.xml, etc. And at various root or /directory/* locations. https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2021/feed-urls/ is a good article with statistics on naming.

I've been adding to my feeds.opml since reddit started dying in ~2015 and now I'm up to around ~1700 feeds and mostly independent from aggregators; though I still collect new feeds from HN/IRC/etc. Mostly I just always make a point to look for them whenever I read something cool on the web.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#5
It’d be neat for readers to seamlessly integrate with a scraper, either self-hosted or commercial, if no feed is found. I believe Inoreader allows scraping a few sites depending on the plan level; most reader services don’t.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#6
Back when I was young, websites had this icon you could click that would take you straight to their RSS feed. You young whipper snappers have gone an fucked that up. Actually, I think it was Google's fault. When they killed their RSS reader people pronounced RSS dead so people just stopped publishing RSS feeds or just didn't link to them.

* Yes, I know the article talks about the RSS icon, i'm just soapboxing.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#7
Tried out the feed finder on my blog again and I have another bug to report - it seems the URLs on the page can cause a crash within the web app! my blog (at matthew.science) uses Zola SSG, and it seems the URLs are formatted with a preceding //: 'Basics of the RISC-V ISA'

This causes the following error: TypeError: URL constructor: //matthew.science/posts/riscv/ is not a valid URL.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#8
This is useful, I set up RSS on my website yesterday.

Turns out the feed finder couldn't find the feeds even though I've linked to them using clickable RSS icons.

I didn't know about the autodiscovery feature so I'll add that now.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#9

Back when I was young, websites had this icon you could click that would take you straight to their RSS feed. You young whipper snappers have gone an fucked that up. Actually, I think it was Google's fault. When they killed their RSS reader people pronounced RSS dead so people just stopped publishing RSS feeds or just didn't link to them. * Yes, I know the article talks about the RSS icon, i'm just soapboxing.

Even better, for a few months the browsers themselves would highlight RSS feeds and allow you subscribe right in the browser. It was too good to last.

RSS is great but it has one great flaw in that it doesn't scale that well by itself. If 2 million people subscribe to your feed and try to update it once an hour, that is 48 million requests a day just for RSS.

What does work well (and how things have evolved) is to have a service that polls RSS on behalf of its users. This was the beauty of Google Reader but plenty of replacements exist.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#10

Back when I was young, websites had this icon you could click that would take you straight to their RSS feed. You young whipper snappers have gone an fucked that up. Actually, I think it was Google's fault. When they killed their RSS reader people pronounced RSS dead so people just stopped publishing RSS feeds or just didn't link to them. * Yes, I know the article talks about the RSS icon, i'm just soapboxing.

Even better, for a few months the browsers themselves would highlight RSS feeds and allow you subscribe right in the browser. It was too good to last. RSS is great but it has one great flaw in that it doesn't scale that well by itself. If 2 million people subscribe to your feed and try to update it once an hour, that is 48 million requests a day just for RSS. What does work well (and how things have evolved) is to ha…

> Even better, for a few months the browsers themselves would highlight RSS feeds and allow you subscribe right in the browser. It was too good to last.

Vivaldi browser still does that.

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