Not only do they not require programming
to use??”they are widely available, much more so than web APIs.
Nonetheless, feeds are still sometimes difficult to find. I first revisit the question of how to
find feeds and the topic of autodiscovery. I then provide examples of feeds that are available
from some specific web sites: a selection of blogs, Wikipedia, Google, and Yahoo! News. You
will see how web sites other than Flickr use feeds. Moreover, I have focused in my examples on
news-oriented web sites because I draw upon such sites in the feed mashups I create with
Yahoo! Pipes later in the chapter.
CHAPTER 4 ?– WORKING WITH FEEDS, RSS, AND ATOM 92
Finding Feeds and Feed Autodiscovery
In the context of Flickr, I mention two ways of finding feeds that are applicable to other web
sites:
??? Looking in the user interface for features such as the common orange icon or the words
feed, RSS, subscribe, and so on
??? Finding documentation for a web site??™s feeds
Let??™s explore some other approaches to finding feeds. There are specialized feed directories
and search engines such as the following, which also has an API (in case you find it useful):
http://www.syndic8.com/
Some of this feed search functionality has been incorporated into feed aggregators (which
I describe more in a moment). For instance, you can browse and search for feeds from within
Google Reader.
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