How To Locate Blog Syndication Feeds
What a Blog Syndication Feed Is
First, not all websites have a blog. But many do.
Second, the blog may have a syndication feed. Most do. If the blog you're interested in has no syndication feed then of course no feed can be located.
The blog is a web page at one URL. The feed is a plain text file at another URL.
Generally, the feed file is at the same domain as the blog. But not always. The feed file may be at a feed service domain, like FeedBurner or other similar services.
The syndication feed is a plain text file with XML markup. The XML tags are expected to conform with one of several blog syndication feed standards.
If you are interested in the different syndication feed standards and versions, the Format Versions and Modules section at RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters has a good explanation,
The syndication feeds are designed to be read by software. Being plain text, they also can be opened in text processing software. Most of the file is human readable so long as the XML markup is ignored and HTML entities are mentally translated into their characters - i.e. HTML entity < represents the less-than character ("<").
Some syndication feeds have only a few of the blog's latest posts, some have many. The blog posts in the feed may be summaries or the entire posts.
How To Find a Syndication Feed
Go to the blog home page. View the web page source code.
If the blog has a syndication feed, the feed's URL will be in an HTML link tag. Look for the link tag in the HEAD area of the source code.
The head area may contain link tags for information other than the location of a syndication feed. For syndication feed link tags, look for link tags with these attributes:
-
rel="alternate"
-
type="application/rss+xml"
or
type="application/atom+xml" -
title="..."
-
href="..."
The link tag will generally have all 4 of those attributes, although the title="..." attribute is not required.
The href attribute contains the syndication feed URL.
There may be more than one link tag with a syndication feed URL. If yes, then put each URL into your browser and view the file. The one you like the best is the one to select.
Here is an example syndication feed link tag:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="//www.willmaster.com/index.xml" />
The above is one of two from the source code of the willmaster.com blog home page, https://www.willmaster.com/blog/ The blog's syndication feed URL is https://www.willmaster.com/index.xml
Click the feed URL above to view the feed in your browser. View the source code of the feed URL to see what one version of an XML syndication feed looks like. (As mentioned further above, there are different standards and versions of syndication feeds.)
If the blog home page source code contains no link tags with the above attributes, then the blog may not have a syndication feed. Some don't. Still, there may be one more place to try.
If the blog home page is not the domain home page (the blog being in a subdirectory), then try to find the syndication feed URL in the source code of the domain home page.
And that's how to locate blog syndication feeds :)
Will Bontrager
