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Saturday, August 30, 2008

Online tool for how to find rss feed of a website?

Finding the RSS Feed for a Website
The websites you already read may have an RSS feed. So you want to find it. Go to BlogStreet’s RSS Discovery tool and enter in a website. It will return the feed for you.
If that doesn’t find the RSS feed, go to the website whose feed you’re looking for; if it has one, then it probably includes a link to it. Try looking on the page’s menu (usually left side or right side) and the footer. Most often RSS feeds are linked to with an small icon. The most common is an XML icon like this: , but there are a number of variations on label (RSS, RSS2, XML, RDF, Atom), colour, and size, such as and . Other times there may not be an image, but text with one of those lables, or a link labeled “Syndicate this site.” You may also see a variation on the standard XML icon such as and ; these are direct links to subscribing to an RSS feed in AmphetaDesk and Radio UserLand (both are RSS aggregators) respectively. Radio’s coffee cup icon is sometimes shown alone.

If you are running one of these news aggregators, click on the icon to subscribe, otherwise just use the usual icon. Note that not all XML icons link to RSS feeds, because there are many other XML formats. If it isn’t labeled or self-evident, just try reading the file in an aggregator; if it doesn’t work, it is probably not an RSS feed.

If you still haven’t found the RSS feed for a website you can try searching in one of the tools listed below. Failing that, write an e-mail to the webmaster and suggest that they create an RSS feed. If they don’t know what that is, you can point them over to this RSS Workshop and these RSS specifications. Lastly, you can scrape the website. MyRSS is a tool for scraping. A number of news aggregators, such as Syndirella, have the ability to “create” an RSS feed, but the feed will only be accessable to people using Syndirella.
Note: the section below was originally based (with permission) on Finding More Channels, a page made by the creator of the AmphetaDesk news aggregator.


Directories
Syndic8
Syndic8 is (mainly) a directory of RSS feeds, over 25,000 of them. You can search (also available on Fagan Finder), or browse the directory (which does not list all of the feeds).
News Is Free
News Is Free is an online news aggregator and a directory of RSS feeds, over 5,000 of them. You can search (also available on Fagan Finder), or browse the directory. News Is Free also provides scraped RSS feeds for a number of websites.
BlogStreet’s RSS Directory
BlogStreet contains a number of blog-related tools. The directory lists the RSS feeds of over 10,000 blogs, organized alphabetically.
RDF-Ticker: Find more channels
RDF-Ticker is an RSS aggregator that displays headlines as a new ticker. Their search (also available on Fagan Finder), includes over 1,800 RSS feeds.
Your Favourite Blog
Many blogs include a blogroll (links to other blogs). Many blogrolls also contain links to the RSS files of those blogs. A good way to find RSS feeds that you’re interested in is by folling links from the blogs you already read.

Search Engine Queries
A number of search engines allow you to view their search results in RSS format. This way, you can monitor the results for a subject that you are interested in.
Daypop
Daypop is a search engine (also available on Fagan Finder) for news, blogs, and RSS feeds (the last is powered by News Is Free). Perform a search, and the result has a link to its RSS feed at the top right of the page.
Feedster
Feedster is a search engine (also available on Fagan Finder) for RSS feeds. Perform a search, and the result has a link to its RSS feed at the top of the page.
BlogDigger
BlogDigger is a search engine (also available on Fagan Finder) for RSS feeds. Perform a search, and the result has a link to its RSS feed at the top right of the page.
Sherch
Sherch lists a number of tools and provides an RSS feed of the results. Unfortunately, it is an old website, and most do not work. Two significant ones that do work are the Internet Movie Database and the Open Directory Project. To use them, click on the link labeled “RSS 1.0 Channel” and add searchterm=[your search terms] to the end of the URL.
Amazon
Sean Nolan has used Amazon’s API to create RSS feeds. The URL for a feed is http://www.yaywastaken.com/amazon/amazon-rss.asp?keywords=[your search terms]
eBay
Use this tool to create a scraped feed of eBay search results. It is based on a script from waxy.org.
Topical Feeds
The Mail Archive
The Mail Archive includes about 2,500 mailing lists; you may be subscribed to one of them already. Search for a list, and click on one of the results. Add maillist.rdf to the URL, and you’ve got an RSS feed.
Yahoo! Groups
Yahoo! Groups is another source of mailing lists. Find a group by searching or browsing (only groups with public archives have feeds available). Then create the RSS feed by adding messages?rss=1 to the URL, to create a feed that looks like http://groups.yahoo.com/group/aggregators/messages?rss=1.
Moreover
Moreover provides RSS feeds for news on over 100 topics, and the news is collected from thousands of sources. This link goes to a listing of all the feeds and a link to their RSS feed.
Network54
Network54 contains forums on entertainment, sports, gaming, and society. Find forums by browsing the directory, and add ;XML=rss to the end of a forum URL to make it an RSS feed.
Blogging Headline News
Blogging Headline News aggregates the RSS feeds from many blogs, and organizes the items into dozens of topics. Each topic has an RSS feed. The topics are shown on the left of the page alphabetically, or you can also view them sorted by popularity.
The Internet Topic Exchange
The Internet Topic Exchange allows anyone to create a topic, and anyone to post items from their blog into that topic. Each topic is available in RSS. So browse the full list of topics, or the topic directory, which lists most of them. The Topic Exchange is currently small but growing every day. Spread the word!
Computing and Technology-Related Feeds
See Meerkat and Network World Fusion.



What is RSS?
RSS can actually be explained in three words, which you’ll find bolded in the second paragraph…
Before you go any further, realize this: RSS is really simple. Just because it is an acronym doesn’t mean that it’s complicated. Don’t get scared away, there’s really nothing to it. I said it was an acronym, but depending on who you ask and what version of RSS you are speaking about, it may stand for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or a variation on one of those. None of that matters to you anyhow. Another thing that you don’t need to care about is the versions. There are 0.90 and 0.91 (created by Netscape), 1.0 (by RSS-DEV), and 0.9x and 2.0 (by UserLand Software) versions, but almost all applications that handle RSS feeds can read all the different versions. There’s also a similar format called Atom, explained below.
RSS is a text-based format, a type of XML. You should know that only because often RSS files are often labeled as XML. RSS version 1.0 is also RDF (whatever), which, again, is important only because an RSS file may be labeled as RDF. RSS files (which are also called RSS feeds or channels) simply contain a list of items. Usually, each item contains a title, summary, and a link to a URL (e.g. a web page). Other information, such as the date, creator’s name, etc., may also be available. The most common use for RSS files is for news and other reverse-chronologically ordered websites like blogs. For example, this particular page on Fagan Finder has a changes log, which is also available in RSS format. An item’s description may contain all of a news article, blog post, etc., or just an extract or summary. The item’s link will usually point to the full content (although it may also point to what the content itself links to).
When a website has an RSS feed, it is said to be “syndicated.” There are various other syndication formats besides RSS (such as Atom), but RSS is by far the most widely used and supported today. RSS files do not have a common file extension, although they frequently end in one of .xml, .rss, or .rdf (note that other extensions may be used also). The term “scraping” refers to creating an RSS feed for a website that doesn’t provide one itself (i.e. scraping the text off of the page). That is, scraped feeds are not created by the same people who created the content within the feed. Scraped RSS feeds may stop working if the page changes its layout.



What is Atom?
Atom is a format quite similar to RSS. It was created by people who felt that RSS could be improved upon, and some that disagreed with some of the politics regarding RSS. Some people are heavily involved in the (quite unimportant, in my opinion) argument as to which format is better. The Atom format is in development, but as of February 2004, Atom version 0.3 is stable. There are pros and cons to the format, but that’s more complex than I am going to deal with here. The basic difference is that while Atom is somewhat more complex (for producers of Atom feeds), it is also able to carry more complex information, and it is consistent across the syndication, storage, and editing of information. Just about everything on this page which discusses RSS applies equally well to Atom. You can learn more about Atom at the official website, AtomEnabled.org.


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