RFC: Solutions for efficient feed discovery

[mistersugar]

Wanted to describe a couple of hurdles to getting feeds to bring into Feedland, and hoping this group might have some possible solutions.

The first scenario: I find a website that has a news page. After confirming I'm not already subscribed to this, or it's not in the Hotlist for me to check/subscribe, I look to see if there is an RSS logo indicating a newsfeed exists. If I find an RSS logo on the page, I control-click to copy the link. If I don't see a logo on the page, I look in the address bar for the feed indicator (I use Vivaldi, mostly); I click that, often have to decide between the main feed and the comments feed (is that a Wordpress thing?), and that opens a new tab with the feed items. I copy the address from the address bar, and go back to Feedland to add the feed.

The second scenario: I find an interesting website that I know must have news. Two examples this week are the Peace Corps and the Equal Justice Initiative. But there are no feed icons on the home page, on the news page, or in the address bar. I open the NetNewsWire app and try to use it's feature to add a site link because it seems to have an autodiscovery feature. If there's still no feed, I write to the organization to ask politely that they provide a feed. (Sidenote from my experience at Duke University: Drupal sites don't automatically have a feed module turned on, so anytime a department site gets upgraded, I have to ask my colleagues to work with the web team to initiate a feed.)

It feels like I'm working hard to find feeds to bring to Feedland. Is this par for the course? Please help me understand what I can do to be more efficient.

And I'm wondering if any of you might be able to simplify this with a bookmarklet like what we use for Radio3 link blogs. I'm not a programmer, so thanks in advance for your ideas and advice.

[scripting]

@mistersugar -- we're all doing the same thing. hunting for feeds. and we're all doing it the same way.

@voitto wrote an app that assists in this. I posted a link here a few days ago. try using it and see if it helps.

The important thing in all cases is to have a way to retain the information we find and share it. I think we've made a big step here in terms of keeping track of feeds that people like. As long as we attract people with the right spirit and a willingness to share, it'll keep developing.

At some point we should have a way of gathering info about the feeds beyond what we have now, but first we have to crawl before we walk before we run before flying. A long way to go, but at least now we've started. :smile:

[dsearls]

There's an RSS feed I'd like that isn't hidden, but I can't make work.

Love the categories. Looking to populate my Photography tab. Only have one feed so far, and want to add one for Ken Rockwell. He conveniently has a page with the feed link (called RSS) on it here:

https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/00-new-today.htm

The link behind RSS goes to this:

https://www.kenrockwell.com/rss-daily.php

Adding that to my feeds doesn't seem to do anything.

Adding some of the links I see in there also don't seem to work.

So either I'm doing something wrong, or there is something wrong with Ken Rockwell's RSS. (I usually bet on the former.)

(I like the @voitto rss.ag utility, btw. Works well for finding other sites/feeds, but not for Ken Rockwell's.)

Doc

P.S. Unable to find the feed for the Customer Commons blog, I just added /feed to the URL, like this: https://customercommons.org/blog/feed . And it worked. Wonder if that's the case for most or all Wordpress blogs.

[scripting]

Doc, you didn't do anything wrong.

1. There's nothing there at Ken's feed. You can see it by turning the URL over to my xmlviewer app --

http://xmlviewer.scripting.com/?url=https://www.kenrockwell.com/rss-daily.php

2. But FeedLand should have done something better with it. Will take a look.

[scripting]

BTW

https://mobile.twitter.com/davewiner/status/1574047504525676545

[akaKenSmith]

Not efficient, due to the quantity, but a search for "rss feeds" at search.usa.gov returns masses of feeds. Some US government departments have several dozen feeds each, and some may be responsive to unfolding events--the Air Force, for example, has a new Monkeypox feed, though with only one item in it so far.

[troutcolor]

As @mistersugar describes for NetNewsWire, I've tried a few feed readers that auto discover feeds from pages inoreader that I can recall. I believe the comments feed is a WordPress thing (maybe other sites too).

Firefox used to auto discover feed (maybe other browsers too). I now use an extension RSSPreview that auto detects and display rss feeds in Firefox since the feature was removed.

Here is a screenshot of the add-on in action on my blog:

There also seems to be an other add-on in my setup: Want my RSS the icon on the left, which does the same sort of thing.

[scripting]

@troutcolor et al --

Here's a good description of how feed discovery works.

https://dri.es/rss-auto-discovery