Before the era of Twitter and microblogging, RSS feeds competed to be the most effective way to deliver the latest news to Internet users. While RSS isn’t nearly as popular today, web services like Feedly do a great job of updating the look and feel of RSS feeds for the evolving web.
As a writer and journalist, I read RSS feeds daily. For others, this can be a great way to get news in a concise and easy-to-follow way. If you regularly browse multiple blogs and news sources, we highly recommend using an RSS feed reader.
However, with the decline in popularity of RSS, there is less public information available about what it is and how you can use it. Many people are unaware of the existence of RSS feeds. The standard RSS icon, while bright and orange, is very ambiguous with things like Wi-Fi and contactless payments.
Even worse, many websites no longer advertise their RSS feed URLs openly, although they are still supported. In this article, let’s talk about how to find the rss feed url for a website even if it’s not publicly advertised.
RSS Browser Extensions
The most efficient way to find the RSS feed of a webpage is to install a third-party RSS extension for your browser.
These extensions simply check the web page for the HTML link rel tag that points to the page’s RSS feeds. They then present RSS feeds as an icon in your browser extension bar.
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A few years ago, many browsers, like Firefox, came with an RSS feed reader preinstalled. You will now need to get them from a third party developer. However, there are many reliable options, and in some cases, these extensions are even created by the browser developer.
Google’s RSS Subscription Extension is the perfect solution for this use case in Chrome, but Firefox has several options, among which we chose Feedbro and Awesome RSS.
For Safari, a simple RSS button for the Safari app is enough, but it costs $ 0.99.
URL Hacking
Another easy way to quickly find an RSS feed URL is to make an educated guess about the URL naming convention.
When you search for support-related pages on a website, you will often notice that the page is located in a subfolder or subdomain of Help or Support. For example, http://google.com/help/ works for Google.
We can do the same for the RSS feed of a web page. Most often, RSS feeds are located in a subfolder of the RSS domain or feed. For example, if you are looking for an RSS feed for http://example.com/, try http://example.com/feed/ and http://example.com/rss/.
Source Code
If all else fails, it’s time to dig into the source. While working with source code often takes a little bit of ingenuity, finding the RSS feed in the source code of a web page is incredibly easy.
When you are on a web page that you suspect an RSS feed may be attached to but you cannot find, right-click anywhere on the page and look for an option, such as View Source as presented in Chrome. …
A window will open showing all the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of the current page. If this all seems strange and confusing, don’t be alarmed. All you have to do is search (Ctrl + F on Windows) for “application / rss”.
While searching for this term will produce results in most cases, you can also try searching for “rss” or “atom”. If nothing was found, the page probably does not have an RSS feed.
The URL for the RSS feed will be the href attribute of the HTML link rel tag. In the screenshot above, you can see one feed located at https://articles.pkrtousd.gb.net/feed/, which we highly recommend you subscribe to!
Depending on how often you need to search for RSS feeds, all of these options are viable and worth exploring. For the general user, however, we definitely recommend the RSS browser extension. Many of them, like the official Google Chrome extension for Chrome, are very lightweight and easily provide exactly what you need.
If you still can’t find the RSS feed URL of a webpage by following these tips, it probably wasn’t provided. If so, check out our article on how to track changes to your site.
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