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Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

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Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#12

Post by jdougan »

sodality2 wrote: post #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.

Theoretically, I think that should work. It (At least it used to be) specified that //site/some/path should assume the uri protocol of the current context. So if it was a link on an http page, it should assume http, same with ftp and https etc. It should work sorta like how a leading slash assumes the current site context.

This was back before the Web became the one true way and is the reason it uses 2 slashes, to distinguish protocol local from site local.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#13

Post by LorenDB »

My modus operandi for finding a non-obvious RSS feed is to check the Wayback Machine's list of saved URLs and search for "RSS", "feed", or "XML". That normally will find the feed as long as it exists.

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#17

Post by yazmeya »

superkuh wrote: post #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 alw…

You should also check if the web page actually exposes this information in a tag. If you're running Chrome, the "RSS Subscription Extension (by Google)" extension [1] will do this for you automatically and light up an orange icon in the extensions bar. It also integrates with popular RSS aggregators so you can subscribe directly from the extension.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rss-subscription-ex...

Re: Deep dive into finding RSS feeds

#18

Post by qw »

AndrewStephens wrote: post #9
HumblyTossed wrote: post #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.

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…

> RSS is great but it has one great flaw in that it doesn't scale that well by itself

The readers often cache the result for all users of the same feed. The only exception are readers that are running 100% locally. In that case using Etag or Last-Modified will make each request cheap and manageble.

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