Being still very inter­ested in web feeds, both prac­ti­cally and philo­soph­i­cally, I sub­scribe to them often. Occa­sion­ally I’ll find a site that seems as though it should have a feed, but con­tains no link to one within a meta dec­la­ra­tion or within the body of the site. Still, most con­tent gen­er­a­tors gen­er­ate feeds, regard­less of whether their users make the feed URLs pub­lic. In cases like this, it’s fun to poke around and see if I can’t guess the cor­rect URL.

The same goes for archives; cer­tain Blog­ger users, for exam­ple, appar­ently turn archive links off, so all that’s eas­ily vis­i­ble are the last ten posts or so on the front page. But, of course, as is espe­cially the case with some­thing as pre­fab as Blog­ger, the archives are acces­si­ble through a very pre­dictable URL schema.

And what about com­ment feeds? These are even more scarcely linked to, but in many cases do exist.

Here are the ones I know so far. I plan to update this post as I dis­cover more. This is as much for my ref­er­ence as it is for yours. So, book­mark it, and, y’know, sub­scribe to the com­ments. If you know of any other schemata, please com­ment. And if you’d like to cre­ate your own feeds from any site, give Feed43 a shot. It’s a bit tough to learn, but I’ve suc­cess­fully made sev­eral use­ful feeds with it.

MySpace

• All blog posts: http://blog.myspace.com/blog/rss.cfm?friendID=[frien­dID]

Word­Press

Note: Some­times Word­Press is installed in a sub­di­rec­tory of the root domain, typ­i­cally named “word­press”, “wp”, or “blog”. If none of the links below work, try insert­ing these or other direc­tory names (e.g., domain.com/wordpress/feed/).

• All blog posts:
  • /wp-feed.php
  • /wp-rss.php
  • /wp-rss2.php
  • /wp-atom.php
  • /feed/
  • /rss/
  • /rss2/
  • /atom/
  • /?feed=rss2
  • /?feed=atom
• All com­ments: /wp-commentsrss2.php
• Sin­gle post com­ments:
  • [perma­link]/comments
  • /?feed=rss2&p=[post ID]
  • /?feed=atom&p=[post ID]

Blog­ger

• Archives: /YYYY_MM_01_archive.html
• All com­ments:: /feeds/comments/default
• Sin­gle post com­ments:
  • /feeds/[postID]/comments/summary (RSS)
  • /feeds/[postID]/comments/default (Atom)
    The value for postID can be found in the post’s page source, within a URL that con­tains “post-edit.g”
• Posts within a label:
  • http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[BlogID]/posts/summary/-/[label­Name] (RSS)
  • http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/[BlogID]/posts/default/-/[label­Name] (Atom)

Flickr

• Pho­tos:
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=[userID]&format=atom
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=[userID]&format=rss_200
• Con­tacts’ Pho­tos:
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne?user_id=[userID]&format=rss_200
  • http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne?user_id=[userID]&format=atom
• All com­ments received: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?user_id=[userID]
• All com­ments left: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_comments.gne?user_id=[userID]
• Favorites: http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_faves.gne?id=[userID]&format=rss_200
  See http://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/. A person’s user ID is vis­i­ble when you hover over “Block this per­son” in their pro­file page. It will look some­thing like 12345678@N00.

Last.fm

• All you need to know is at Audio­scrob­bler Web Ser­vices.

deviantART

• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=by:[user­name]%20sort:time%20-in:scraps
• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery:[user­name]%20sort:time&type=deviation
• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=by:[user­name]%20sort:time%20in:journal
• http://backend.deviantart.com/rss/journal/[user­name].xml (broken)

Live­Jour­nal

• All blog posts:
  • http://[user­name].livejournal.com/data/rss
  • http://[user­name].livejournal.com/data/atom
• Com­ments:
  

  No, com­ment feeds are not avail­able on Live­Jour­nal. The FAQ I have ref­er­enced above explains how you may pro­pose this as a sug­ges­tion to Live­Jour­nal developers.

YouTube

• Favor­ited videos: http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/[user­name]/favorites?v=2

Other

If you can’t iden­tify the blog­ging plat­form used on a par­tic­u­lar site, just give these a shot. They’ll work prob­a­bly two out of three times.

• /feed/
• /rss/
• /atom/
• /rss.xml
• /atom.xml
• /index.xml
• /index.rdf
• /index.php?atom=1

Thanks to Blog­ger Buster’s three-part series on Blog­ger feeds for a bunch of tricks.