RSS Feed Discovery?

December 12, 2019 10:46 PM

I was looking for an RSS feed for Everlasting Blort but coming up empty - what tools do you use to discover/create a feed when it is not obvious or doesn't exist?
posted by mrbenn to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: To find ones that exist, I usually just rely on Feedly's feed search which lets you plug in a search term or url and will usually turn something up if it exists.

To create one where one doesn't already exist, I haven't used it but FetchRSS seems decent and easier to use than the one I've used before which I think was Feed43.

I imagine FetchRSS would have the same issue Feed43 had (and presumably most implementations would have) in that it is keying on html tags, classes, and/or ids to figure out what is supposed to constitute a post/article. So if the site undergoes a revamp or something, it's likely to break.
posted by juv3nal at 11:23 PM on December 12, 2019

My first step if one doesn't show up when searching with my Firefox extension (the unfortunately named "Feedbro"), I view source and see if I can find an Atom or RSS feed.

I don't think that EB has a feed, though as it's a one-off "roll-your-own handcrafted labor-of-love code" site. I tinkered with FetchRSS and it might be able to fudge an RSS feed out of EB but I'm not confident that it'll work without breaking after a few site updates.

FWIW, there are a handful of sites that I check regularly that I don't use a feedreader for. Everlasting Blort is one of them.
posted by jzb at 4:22 AM on December 13, 2019

I do the same thing as jzb - look into the source of the page for atom.xml or .rss. I've only come up empty a couple of times, and my daily list is about 100 feeds.

Both of the Blorters are mefites. Drop 'em a line? Maybe there's a secret link somewheres.
posted by jquinby at 5:49 AM on December 13, 2019

Another option for creating a feed. If I can't get a working site feed I'll generate a feed to the Twitter account using TwitRSS or subscribe to the site's mailing list.
posted by amestoy at 12:25 PM on December 13, 2019