Hidden RSS Feeds

Posted on August 6, 2003

You know what I hate? When someone launches a blog, but doesn’t bother providing an RSS feed. (I’m almost at the point now where a site may as well not even exist if it doesn’t show up in my newsreader.)

You know what I love? When the software they’re using generates an RSS feed without telling them 🙂

That’s the case with Bill Maher’s new blog, for example. There’s nothing on the site to indicate an RSS feed of any type. However, I’ve found that often you can discover hidden feeds on sites just by taking the site’s URL and trying these file names with it:

• index.xml
• index.rdf
• rss.xml

Many popular blogging packages spit out feeds using these file names by default, without even asking, so you occasionally get lucky — and that’s the case with Maher. He’s spitting out an RSS 1.0 feed at this address:

http://www.safesearching.com/billmaher/blog/index.rdf

Nice, now I get my daily dose of Maher right in my newsreader! Huzzah! Now, if only he’d make it official so folks don’t have to play Blog Archaeologist to find it…