https://theoldreader.com has been my go-to since google reader was killed. It's pretty good at sussing out the rss feed of random blogs if one exists, too.
Sorry for the random question, but I’ve been trying to get more into RSS, and figure it’s worth asking someone who has a lot of experience - is there a reliable way to find an RSS feed for a given site, assuming it has one? Or is it a set of heuristics you try?
Are there good tools to RSSify sites that don’t have one?
Awesome, thanks! Especially for the pointers to those rssifiers.
For the first question, I should clarify that I'm hoping to just ingest these RSS feeds myself in various scripts. But yeah, makes sense that most of the good feed readers mostly take care of that.
Websites usually link to their RSS feed using a <link> attribute in the head of the page.
Browsers used to detect this and show an RSS icon near the address bar if the website you were viewing had a feed - and you could click the icon to see more details and subscribe.
With decent RSS apps, you can generally just paste in the URL of any page (or the site's homepage) and they will take care of examining the HTML to find the URL of the actual feed.
I use Folo which has Rsshub built in. You simply search for a source you want, or add your own with a known URL for everyone to use. Otherwise you can use Rsshub with a reader of your choice.
That's actually what I've been doing, but sites that very clearly should have an RSS feed (specifically, our local governments' event calendar pages), don't, so I thought there might be some other route/heuristic/whatever that I've been missing :-(.
Depends how you define lost. I still use it every day.
Is it a popular main stream thing? No. Does every since site offer feeds for every reasonable thing you could want to subscribe to? But does it still work quite well for those that want to use it? Yes.
What "war"? RSS is an open standard and still going strong. It doesn't need to win or compete or whatever business words from warfare are hyped nowadays. It just needs to exist. The genie is already out of the bottle, for 20+ years.
Discord, WhatsApp, and iMessage are all messaging applications that aren't directly related to the use case for RSS.
That leaves Twitter and Instagram as the two major sites for which RSS would be applicable, but which don't natively offer RSS feeds. And a cursory web search reveals the large number of solutions people have come up with for subscribing to content from Twitter and Instagram via RSS, indicating that there's significant demand for it.
It's also worth noting that with Twitter in decline, the main competitors gaining traction, BlueSky and Mastodon, do both natively offer RSS feeds.
On top of that, the entire podcasting ecosystem is fundamentally based on RSS, and it's still the primary mechanism for syndicating blog content.
Well, RSS won the battle, but lost the war.