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When I was building the source list for jkl.io noticed at lot of sites no longer offering RSS and even sites like Wordpress seem to be not offering it frequently (is this authors not turning it on, turning it off, or am I missing something?).

Hand scraping all these sites would be an exercise in insanity so now building an intelligent crawler is already something I have to do much earlier than I wanted. RSS really matters for the open web.




Most sites still have a feed even if the UI doesn't surface it. Pull up the source or Inspector and search for feed, atom, or rss. It's usually in the <head>


And even if the rss meta elemnets are missing wordpress will still generate rss at /feed/. For example: http://danieru.com/feed/

This same method works for category specific feeds: http://danieru.com/category/life/feed/


You can even get a specific flavor of feed, in some cases.

/feed gets you an RSS feed on WordPress.

/feed/atom gets you the Atom feed on WordPress.

/feeds/posts/default gets you the Atom feed on BlogSpot blogs (no RSS there, AFAIK).

/rss gets RSS on Tumblr (no Atom there, AFAIK).

Edit: trying to fix broken formatting.


For niflet.com I skip sites that don't have an RSS / Atom feed. It's maybe 2% of them. For political sites maybe 10%; it seems a lot of those sites predated WordPress et al. You probably know this already, but for WordPress try adding "/feed" to the URL. This works for lots of other non-WP sites too. The blog author might not even know what an RSS feed is.


Yeah I've noticed a few hidden ones, perhaps I need to make a script and go back to check the ones I thought didn't have one. niflet.com looks great, I like the minimalism.


(shameless plug) Create auto-updating RSS feeds for any webpage with Feedity: http://feedity.com




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