As a dedicated RSS user, you must have noticed some sites no longer go overboard to cater to you. Once when you will prominently see an RSS logo on a site, now, they are nowhere to be found. But RSS feed is still in existence, although it is now more difficult to find them because browsers don’t indicate them, and web pages hardly link to them. Despite this, most websites still offer RSS feeds.
Even after these years, RSS feeds are still beneficial. A lot of sites now prefer to hide the link to their RSS feeds. There are available RSS feeds on WordPress websites – unless they have been manually taken off by the admin. When you follow the RSS feed of a site, you get the opportunity to remain up-to-date on all contents the website publishes. This is particularly useful for those are busy and have overwhelming schedules – they will not have to miss out on contents from their favorite websites.
So, how do you get a site’s RSS feed URL?
Look for the RSS feed symbol
There are still some websites that have the standard orange RSS feed logo. When you locate this symbol, click on it and you will be taken to the RSS feed of the web page.
Finding hidden RSS feeds on most websites
There are a lot of websites built using WordPress – it is estimated that about 30 percent of the most visited sites are made by making use of WordPress, and all of them have feeds that can be easily gotten. To get the RSS URL feed on sites built with WordPress, all you need to do is include “feed” to the URL of the website and you will be taken to the RSS feed – example https://example.com/feed. If this doesn’t work, then that means that the website is not powered by WordPress, you can then try other methods such as:
- Add “RSS” to websites that are hosted on Tumblr such as https://example.com/rss.
- For websites that Blogger hosts, include “feeds/posts/default” to the URL, for instance, https://example.org/feeds/posts/default.
- Add “feed” before the name of the publication if is built on Medium. So, a site such as medium.com/example-site then changes to medium.com/feed/example-site.
- For YouTube pages, copy the URL and then paste it into an RSS reader.
Check the source code
If none of these methods are successful, check the source code of the web page to get the RSS feed. This can simply be done by right-clicking on a space that is empty on the site you wish to get its feed, and then select View Page Source’. Next, press “Ctrl+F” to search the code on Linux or Windows, or “command+F” on Mac computers.
Another method of finding RSS feeds of websites is to look at the HTML source, no matter the browser being used. Although it varies how you view it on each browser, for most browsers, all you have to do is to select “Page Source” under the “View” menu found at the top of your window. There are some browsers that this option can be found in the “Developer” menu. Once the Source window appears with the website’s HTML, make use of the “Find” option to search for the RSS feed. This will give you a long link – you can see the RSS URL feed in-between the quotes in the link.
Create a custom RSS feed
There are some websites that don’t just offer RSS feeds. But as disappointing as that sounds, there are tools available for scanning for RSS feeds on websites. Some of these tools are used regularly searching sites and creating RSS feeds. All that is required is the URL of the site and some parameters. This is done by:
- The URL of the page: This can be done simply by copying the site’s URL and then pasting it.
- Search for links inside HTML elements.
- Go back to the web page you wish to create the RSS feed. Right-click and select “inspect”.
- A pop-up window will appear, showing you the code of the website along with the website itself.
These are just some examples of finding RSS feeds for websites. Recent tools allow users to create their own custom RSS feeds that can give them all information imaginable.