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How to access RSS feeds for websites that don't advertise one

Table of Contents

intro

The popularity of RSS/ATOM news feeds seems to be declining, so much so that Mozilla has stopped supporting news feeds and Live Bookmarks around version 64 of its Firefox web browser. I find the lack of support for news feeds very discouraging at a time when more people are turning to the World Wide Web for news and especially so given the censorship and purging that is taking place on all of the mainstream social media platforms.

Social media is not an alternative to news feeds, especially when mega-corporations like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Reddit, etc., are purging, censoring and shadow banning many high quality people and organizations from their platforms as the U.S. descends into the realm of the radical left/communist/woke/politically correct ideology.

Due to rampant censorship and deplatforming on all mainstream social media platforms, if you want to follow someones news feed on YouTube, Vimeo or any other mainstream website, you should check if they publish their content elsewhere such as BitChute, Rumble, etc., and subscribe to that feed instead.

In my case i watch many websites and this would hardly be possible without news feeds and a news feed reader which automatically collects all of the latest headlines and articles from all of them and presents the content in a unified interface.

To read news feeds you'll need a feed reader. You can find various add-ons for Firefox at the Mozilla add-ons website. If you want to check out my preferred news reader, see the Firefox Extensions - My Picks page. For other browsers you'll have to check your repository. If you would rather use dedicated software instead of a browser extension, check out the article 14 Best RSS Feed Readers for Linux in 2018.

With our feed reader in hand, we should be able to access any RSS or ATOM news feed as long as the publishing platform generates one, regardless of whether the website displays a link to the feed. Following are some tips to pull feeds from various platforms which don't make their feed URLs obvious.

websites

    • BitChute - replace <channel_name> with the user name of the channel:
      https://api.bitchute.com/feeds/rss/channel/<channel_name>
    • Medium - read the Medium tutorial, RSS feeds
    • Squarespace - read the Squarespace tutorial, Finding your RSS feed URL
    • Steemit/Hive - Steemit doesn't provide any feeds so far as i'm aware, however you can use the 3rd party website, hiverss.com, to generate a feed for a Steemit channel - replace <channel_name> with the actual channel name:
      http://www.hiverss.com/@<channel_name>/feed
    • Subatack - replace <user_name> with the user name of the account:
      https://<user_name>.substack.com/feed
    • Tumblr - replace <user_name> with the user name of the account: https://<user_name>.tumblr.com/rss
    • Vimeo - replace <channel_name> with the user name of the channel:
      https://vimeo.com/<channel_name>/videos/rss
    • WordPress - WordPress sites can generate several kinds of feeds by default. How best to access them depends on whether the blog owner has enabled permalinks, but regardless of whether they have or not, WordPress will reveal the proper feed address even if we use the wrong URL format. Try adding any of the following to the root domain of the website:
/feed
/?feed=rss
/?feed=rss2
/?feed=rdf
/?feed=atom

You can also grab feeds for a specific category by apopendingfeed/ to the category/tag URL.

  • YouTube - replace <channel_id> with the actual channel ID which is obtainable by right clicking anywhere on a user's channel page to display your browsers context menu, then click the menu item to view the source code of the page after which you want to search (Ctrl+F) for channelid:
    https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=<channel_id>

generic methods for accessing feeds

If none of the above apply to the website you're trying to acquire a news feed for, try these generic methods by adding one of the following to the website's root domain. You can also try adding a trailing slash to these:

/feed
/rss
/atom
/feed/atom
/?feed=rss
/?feed=atom

You can try this little trick with any website, though it obviously will not work if the publishing platform does not produce a feed. Also see the article, Find an RSS Feed URL, from 'Gloo'.

getting updates from websites that don't generate feeds

If a website does not produce a news feed at all and you don't want to have to visit it regularly to see if anything new has been posted, then some sort of 3rd party service or browser extension can be utilized. In the case of Firefox there are a few add-ons that can monitor a website for changes, such as Update Scanner. There are also a number of utilities that will help you create news feeds, such as the Feed Creator and FetchRSS.

You can also use the free Open RSS service which is accomplished by simply prefixing the domain with openrss.org/. Using the excellent UnchartedX video channel on Rumble as an example, the channel URL is https://rumble.com/c/UnchartedX and so we end up with https://openrss.org/rumble.com/c/UnchartedX.

helpful add-ons that auto-detect news feeds or page updates

If you use Firefox, check out these add-ons:

  • List Feeds by igorlogius
  • Update Scanner by 'sneakypete81' is a nice utility that will check a webpage for updates by comparing the current version of a page to a stored snapshot. This is handy when a site simply doesn't generate any news feeds.

recent changes

Following are the most recent changes.

26-Jul-2024

  • updated BitChute feed URL