I had a good few feeds that had errors that prevented them from parsing. I examine the flaws and parse them anyway. Then one day I discover a website had dropped rss support long ago but I had it in my aggregator?? I open the feed url I was using and it just redirected to the index.html took a minute to realize what was going on. If it couldn't find <item> or anything like it it would look for anything similar, if it couldn't find <link> or <guide> it would search for <a>, if it couldn't find a <title> it would take the text from the <a> or use the url and lastly if it couldn't find or parse <pubdate> it would look inf the item url had something like /2025/ in it, prerably /months/ and /day/ with it.

So that was what was going on. It could find links on the frontpage and it could parse titles and dates from those.

You apparently don't need feeds. No AI required.

A surprising number of sites still support RSS even though they don't have an icon or a link to the feed in the UI - so it's worth checking the page source to see if there's a feed URL.

It's one of the big things I'll credit Wordpress for - they enable RSS by default so a lot of sites support it without even meaning to.

Lots of websites still have RSS... even I have RSS on my website, took me half a day to figure out how to do it all by myself. The site is generated using code I wrote myself... and it was quite easy to generate the XML needed from all pages - which is all you need for a RSS feed.

I feel MOST blogs still use RSS/Atom. Back in the day, Feedly had a migration from Google Reader which involved just logging in via your Google Account. All your feeds were there. It's been rock solid for me ever since.

Now they've expanded into threat intelligence and I'll get popups asking me if I'm interested in the latest CVE or whatever, but I just dismiss those and read my blogs and comics. Not shilling, in fact I work for a competitor, but I use it every day!

There are tools like https://github.com/dgtlmoon/changedetection.io that allow to create your own RSS feeds from website changes.

Anyone know of any good alternatives nowadays? Substack?

RSS is still alive and well! I even keep a public rss river feed of a bunch of sites I like so I can share my curation with others: https://infoscope.disinfo.zone - of course this has an RSS feed too...