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How Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (openrss.org)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

The browser had a built-in RSS button that would display in the browser location bar when any website you're on had an RSS feed available. Clicking the button would then take you to the RSS feed for that web page

How would this work? Do websites with rss feeds normally publish the url to that feed in some standard place? Are there any third party extensions that do it?

[-] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

How would this work? Do websites with rss feeds normally publish the url to that feed in some standard place?

feeds are usually advertised in the page header as below, with type set to either application/rss+xml or application/atom+xml.

<head>
  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Example Feed" href="https://example.com/feed/" />
</head>

Are there any third party extensions that do it?

i don't know about chrom[e|ium], but i use Awesome RSS for firefox.

[-] [email protected] 12 points 6 months ago

How did I not know websites did this. Here I was always trying to guess the urls a few times before giving up lol. Today I learned...

Thanks for the extension suggestion too!

[-] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

Most readers will also do this auto-discovery for you. So typically you can just paste the page or article URL and it will find the feed.

Of course the extension is nicer because you don't need to guess and check, you get a quick indicator if there is a feed or not.

Personally I use Want My RSS because I like the preview which then lets me know if it is a full-text feed or just summaries. This is also Firefox only. But extensions for other browsers are available.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 6 months ago

That's perfect since I use FF anyway, thanks

[-] [email protected] 10 points 6 months ago

I believe there is a standard tag for an RSS feed

[-] [email protected] 7 points 6 months ago

Also, some (most?) RSS readers don't need the path to the feed directly. You give them the regular URL and they'll figure it out. TinyTinyRSS does it.

[-] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

Yes, they do. In no particular order:

  • Do a View Source on the site's frontpage. You might see some HTML for "application/atom+xml" or "application/rss+xml". The URLs associated with those hrefs will be for the ATOM and RSS feeds.
    • If you search for one of the following in the HTML source you'll probably run into the feeds:
      • rss
      • atom
      • feed
      • json
  • Look for a syndication page on the site. It should have links to the feeds.
  • You might see the RSS feed icon or the ATOM feed icon on the page.
  • Many CMSes (Wordpress in particular) automatically put them at /feed on the site.
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
179 points (95.9% liked)

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