Wednesday, 20 April 2011

How do I find out my RSS feed address in Blogger


I had a question on Google Chat from a blogger wanting to know how to finf the web address of their own blog hosted on Blogger. Here are three or four ways.

There are three or four ways. However, first let me explain that you (usually) do not need to worry about the difference between “RSS” and “Atom” feeds – both should work, but you can try the other if you are having trouble.
Sometimes you will see feeds labelled “RSS 2.0″ – this is a more developed version of RSS that provides for “Enclosures” (like file “attachments” on emails) and is used for automatic distribution of podcasts or other media files.
So, ways to find the web address of a blog feed.

1 – Look at the Bottom of the Page

A lot of Blogger blog designs have the address at the bottom of the page, where it will say something like: “Posts (Atom).
The screenshot is from my mattwardman.blogspot.com “holding page” blog, which just exists as a demonstrator when I need to show examples using Blogger.
20080422-blog-questions-rss-feed-address-blogger
You can see the address in the same place on (for example) Ordovicius and Macnumptyat the time of writing.
You can get the web address by using the “Copy link location” (Firefox) or “Copy shortcut” (Internet Explorer) option from the “Right-Click” Menu.
Alternatively, click on the link and just copy the web address from the “address” box in your web browser.

2 – Look in the Source Code for the Page

Use the “View->Source” or “View->Page Source) option from your browser to see the HTML (Ye gods, so many acronyms! I’m assuming you know this one) version of the web page.
There are a couple of lines of code (the Wardman Wire currently has three) that define the web address of the feed. These begin:
<link rel=”alternate”
Here is a screenshot of the source code from the Ordovicius blog:
20080422-blog-questions-rss-feed-address-blogger-source-screendump
Note that the source code lines have wrapped to make the screenshot a reasonable width, and I have highlighted the relevant lines of code (in red); these lines include the web address of each feed.

3 – Auto-discovery

This is a little more involved, so I’ll skip the technicalities. It is a feature that lets your RSS Reader software (such as Feeddemon or Google Reader) find the feed address automatically when you enter the website address.
If you enter the website address into your RSS Reader software, usually it will find the RSS Feed Address for you.
In subscribing to hundreds of feeds from blogs hosted on blogger I have found this feature to be a little hit and miss.
(Technical diversion: the guts of this feature is another line in the source code for the web page that looks something like this – this one is for the Wardman Wire Atom format feed:
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom 0.3″ href=”http://www.mattwardman.com/blog/feed/atom/” />

4 – Get it from your RSS Reader software

Of course, if it is a blog you are already subscribed to, then you can simply look at the “properties” of the feed in your RSS Reader.

Wrapping Up

If you are on another blogging platform, then you should always be able to find it by looking at the source code.

And a final tip

In WordPress, you can add “/feed” to the end of any category web address to get a feed of the articles in that category.
Try this one, which is Ellee Seymour’s “Missing Persons” feed.
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