--- In radio-userland@y..., Andrew <Andrew@D...> wrote:
> I know that bluesnews has a RSS channel, as Slashdot supports it.
>
> Anyone got any idea how I'd go about finding the address?

I haven't seen a great guide to finding RSS feeds. The best ways I've
found are by:

- The orange XML icon.
- Identifying software.
- Feed lists.
- Search engines.

As always, the little orange XML icon [1] should link to an RSS feed
of some flavor or another, but if the site in question has one, you
don't have a problem finding its feed. Make sure to look for other
links, though: PHPnuke sites typically have a, "You can syndicate our
news using the file backend.php," link at the bottom. Also look at a
site's FAQ. Blue's News doesn't mention a syndication file at all that
I could see.

With no XML icon, try identifying what kind of content management
software the site uses. A given package will put its feed in the same
place: try /xml/rss.xml (or /xml/scriptingNews2.xml) for a Manila site
[2], /backend.php for PHPnuke [3], or /<sitename>.rdf for Slash [4]
(eg, the feed for scifistorm.org [5] is /scifistorm.rdf). Since Blue's
News uses custom Blammo! software [6], this doesn't help any either.

Barring that, look in feed lists. These include Radio's Hotlist,
Weblogs.com [7], Moreover [8], RSS Info's feed list [9], newsfeeds
[10], and the public aggregators such as 10am [11], My UserLand [12],
and NewsIsFree [13]. NewsIsFree is key in that it exports [14] all its
channels [15], including those it scrapes from HTML itself. This is
also a handy trick if you absolutely *need* to convert a feed in one
version of RSS to another, and NewsIsFree happens to have that feed.
10am does this also for its sources [16], but its RSS feeds (eg, its
Chicago Tribune feed [17]) are much less friendly, though it will
build a custom feed for its topical categories [18] or syndicate a
search [19]. Since neither 10am nor NewsIsFree syndicate Blue's News,
this also doesn't help.

The long shot is to use search engines. Probably something simple like
"bluesnews rss xml", which doesn't turn anything up.

If none of those work, the site almost certainly has no public feed.
That means emailing the webmaster asking for an RSS feed, or emailing
an aggregator asking for a scraped feed if you can't set up a scraper
yourself. It might be useful for the community to keep a FAQ-like list
of all the popular sites that *don't* publish syndication feeds for
whatever reason (starting with Blue's News) to keep people from going
through all that for the most common cases, but then ideally sites
would disappear off the list as soon as possible.


Mark
markpasc@...

[1] http://scripting.com/images/xml.gif
[2] http://www.manilasites.com/
[3] http://phpnuke.org/
[4] http://slashcode.com/
[5] http://www.scifistorm.org/
[6] http://www.base6.com/blammo/
[7] http://www.weblogs.com/
[8] http://www.moreover.com/
[9] http://blogspace.com/rss/feeds/
[10] http://newsfeeds.manilasites.com/
[11] http://10.am/
[12] http://my.userland.com/
[13] http://www.newsisfree.com/
[14] http://www.newsisfree.com/export.php3
[15] http://www.newsisfree.com/sitesbycat.php3
[16] http://10.am/sources
[17] http://10.am/sources/chicago_tribune-rss
[18] http://10.am/docs/feedbuilder.htm
[19] http://10.am/search/-rss?search=p2p