Please, expose your RSS

Hot tip: YouTube channels do expose an RSS feed; you can subscribe to a channel by just pasting its URL in your news reader.

You might find RSS feeds in other unexpected places! Use an extension to put the "subscribe via RSS" button back in your browser.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/> https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/rss-subscription-ex...>

I definitely see the author's points, but I disagree with the proposed solution. Feed discoverability should be a basic browser feature, not something web developers need to actively implement, nor some information that users have to scrape themselves from the DOM.

I made an extension back in the day that parses the tags and puts back the feed icon where it's supposed to be (on the right side of the URL bar), and also renders the feeds properly rather than just spitting out the raw XML : https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/rss-viewer/

This is how the web used to work 10 years ago. The tag has a purpose: it instructs browsers that the current page has a feed, so the browser can parse it and show a feed button to the user. Both Firefox and Chrome used to work this way 10 years ago.

Then motherfucking evil Google began its war against feeds. First it killed Google Reader, then it stopped complying with the conventions, removed the feed icon from their browser and stopped rendering RSS/Atom. Firefox quickly complied too.

Let's make it clear once and for all: yes, I, can add an RSS URL to my website to make discoverability easier, but it's not my job as a web developer to explicitly make feed discoverability easier by modifying my frontend. That's just a workaround. My job as a web developer should be to provide the right element, and then the browser should know what to do with it. Just like the browser is supposed to know what to do with scrollbars if my divs exceed the window size.

And, as a user, I shouldn't write my custom JavaScript to parse the feed URL from the DOM. Just like I'm not expected to write my JS user script to render the title of the page. If browsers refuse to provide such basic features, then it's a browser problem. I would say "choose a browser that natively supports feeds", but there's none left. So use extensions to mitigate the impact of feed-hostile browser politics.

Thanks for sharing

As autodiscovery is often broken or missing on many sites, my feed reader Temboz falls back to testing these suffixes in the forlorn hope there may be a RSS or Atom feed hiding somewhere:

      'feed', 'feed/', 'rss', 'atom', 'feed.xml',
      '/feed', '/feed/', '/rss', '/atom', '/feed.xml',
      'index.atom', 'index.rss', 'index.xml', 'atom.xml', 'rss.xml',
      '/index.atom', '/index.rss', '/index.xml', '/atom.xml', '/rss.xml',
      '.rss', '/.rss', '?rss=1', '?feed=rss2',

I actually made https://hn-blogs.kronis.dev a while ago, which was based on RSS/Atom feeds that people shared on HN, it's still running in the background and pulls in the latest posts daily. There are links to the original HN post and a blog post that I made about it all on the site, but here's the post directly: https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/ever-wanted-to-read-thousan...

It was certainly interesting to do and I love that the technology exists, however a lot of people handle integrating it differently. Sometimes the feed type is misreported, other times you can't quite get all of the meta data about the feed or items you'd like, whereas sometimes you either have the whole thing just throw a network error, or just have someone with control sequences in the text which breaks your attempts at parsing XML.

I'm convinced that the larger the scale of your dataset, the more potential issues you're going to run into, at some point if any type of error can occur, you're going to have to deal with it.