Template Feed/Archive URL Structures for Various Blogging Platforms (Updating)

2 Responses · February 15, 2008

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

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.

Any clue as to how I can create a feed of my MyS­pace per­so­nal acti­vity stream? I want to add it to my website’s news­feed (unpu­blished as of yet) so peo­ple can see my MyS­pace upda­tes along with blog posts, Blog­ger posts, Twit­ter upda­tes, etc. I can’t find info anywhere. Any help you can give me would be boss. Thanks.

Sam Sinister · May 7, 2009

Hey Sam– Actually MyS­pace is noto­rious for not pro­vi­ding feeds. All they offer is feeds on users’ blog posts. Lame, I know.

Jay · May 7, 2009

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