RSS

[lizzie_and_ari]

Does someone feel like explaining this to me? I have a couple of things set up in Google reader, from pages that have the wee symbol on, but can you set up your own rss feed from a page without the symbol?

Thanks

Lizzie

Comments

[andrewducker]

The RSS feed is generally set up on the original website - they're basically a version of the page without any formatting, so that they can be displayed elsewhere.

The reason why the page has the symbol on it is because there's a link in the HTML. For instance, on the BBC News page there's this:
<link href="http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="BBC News - Home" />
(you can open that file up to see what RSS looks like)

If the page doesn't have a link to its RSS then it's likely it doesn't have any. But it's worth checking. Which sites are you interested in? I could take a look.

[snarlish.livejournal.com]

Google reader will find feeds from just about any webpage that allows one, and you can also pull down feeds that show only certain keywords you've asked for (ie, i vanity search for mentions of heyoka's photographs in blogs and newssites).

this help page goes into more detail as to where to find feed and adding them to Reader even if they aren't noted as RSS or Atom.

http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70002

note that sometimes pages have more than one feed, and you might want to choose one of them, or a 'top-level' one. ie, i read all of discover magazines blog feeds under one feed, but not their main site news feed.

additionally, you can point Google Alerts to Reader, but it's probably easier to just keyword search blogs and news in reader.

hope this helps.