Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom

Finding Feeds to Read

Identifying sites that make feeds available can be tricky. There is no standard place to publish a feed, nor is there any particular filename or path to look for one. Of course, there are various methods for sites to identify their feeds, but none are universal. Nevertheless, if you can’t see an explicit link to a feed, here’s a few things you can try:

• Look for the traditional feed icon, the white writing on an orange background, usually reading “XML” (see Figure 2-7). There are variants on this theme, but they’re all recognizable.

  Figure 2-7. The garden variety eggplant

• View Source on the site’s main page. If you see a line within the head section of the code that reads:

  <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href= "http://www.example.org/
  rss.xml"/>

• the href part is the URL you want. This is a called an Auto-Discovery link and is discussed in Chapter 9.

• You can try the most common URLs. Look for index.xml, index.rdf, rss.xml, rss.php, index.rss, or index.atom; usually, one of these will work.

• Look up the site in Syndic8 (http://www.syndic8.com). This directory, also covered in Chapter 9, has over 200,000 feeds listed.

If the site you’re most keen on doesn’t have a feed available, it helps to ask it for one. A lot of site authors just don’t know how welcome it would be. Ask!