RSS Guides

Finding RSS Feeds - Detect stirrings in the depths of the web

If the concept of an RSS feed is a little challenging to grasp, just think of it as a log of when a website changes. By checking this log regularly, often through the use of an app or by comparing the date of the latest update listed, we can keep up with new changes to online spaces we enjoy exploring when there is something new to view. This saves us the time of going through an entire site to see if anything new has been added.

However when looking at a website it can sometimes be less than obvious whether or not it has an RSS feed. Sometimes there will be a button that will redirect to the XML or Atom for a site, but other times it will be necessary to dig a little bit to know for certain.

On Desktop

1. Right click on an unoccupied section of a webpage and click Inspect. Let’s use itch.io for testing the following steps.

2. Search for an HTML link tag that contains the word alternate. For example

   • <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Featured games on itch.io" href="https://itch.io/feed/featured.xml">

3. The link that is shown in the href section of the HTML tag will be the address needed for setting up RSS. In the previous example it would be the https://itch.io/feed/featured.xml section of the code snippet.

On Mobile (Firefox and Chrome)

1. Right Click on the website you want to check for an RSS feed. Let’s use itch.io again as an example

2. In the address bar for the browser, add view-source: before the address of the website. It would look similar to this:

   • view-source:https://itch.io/

3. Now we want to search for the word alternate to find the relevant HTML tag, using the Find in Page option for something appearing similar to:

   • <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Featured games on itch.io" href="https://itch.io/feed/featured.xml">

4. Now that we have found the HTML link tag that has the information we need, all that is left is to copy the address in the tag, which would be similar to this:

   • https://itch.io/feed/featured.xml

Finding RSS Feeds for Commonly Visited sites

• Obsidian & Quartz
  • Websites hosted or made using Obsidian (or Quartz since it has overlap in functionality) will likely have an RSS feed of the most recent articles or pages published, often times as a default option that the site owner may not be aware of.
    • Speaking from our own experience from running this garden using Quartz, it caught us off guard that we didn’t need to do anything to set up our own RSS feed.
  • The method for finding this feed is not the same process as usual. Attempts to find the alternate keyword in the HTML elements will not work, but instead try adding /index.html at the end of the site to see if the site changes.
    • An example of this would be the Quartz documentation, which will not have an alternative RSS link in its inspected HTML document but will display a compatible RSS feed if the link is changed to be https://quartz.jzhao.xyz/index.xml
• Dreamwidth User pages typically have an RSS and Atom feed already enabled so many RSS aggregators are able to detect this from just inputting the username.dreamwidth.org address
  • But if this does not work there is a concise guide on the FAQ section which shares that the following addresses will work if a user has RSS or Atom enabled:

    •   https://username.dreamwidth.org/data/rss
        
        https://username.dreamwidth.org/data/atom
      

Adding RSS to neat platforms

Add RSS to Neocities sites

• This guide provides a concise way to add an RSS feed to a Neocities site.

Add RSS to Quartz

• The documentation is pretty nice for getting this set up, but ultimately the setting in the quartz.config.ts that needs to be enabled is this plugin listed in the emitters collection:

  • Plugin.ContentIndex({
      enableSiteMap: true,
      enableRSS: true,
    }),