brentashley

I’m getting up to speed with Radio Userland, setting up subscriptions for the news aggregator. In order to do that, you have to find the RSS file for each site you want to put in your subscription list.

When you go to a Manila site like this one, you’ll probably find that the template they use has the orange XML button (look to the left there) that takes you to the RSS file. It’s obvious, simple.

Quite a few people seem to have a template that doesn’t have the button. If you can guess that they’re using Manila, you can find the file by looking where you expect it to be (xml/scriptingNews2.xml). If not, you have to search all over their site to find some sort of RSS link. No RSS link, no automatic news aggregation, gotta go in the manual browse list.

I’m surprised at how many sites I visit regularly make me have to search for this. On many of them it’s not to be found at all or at least escapes me completely:
Joel, Eric, Chris, Aaron are a few.

I guess Radio’s the first bigtime app to make this stuff an everyday thing, but most blogging environments support RSS, so it’s probably just a matter of throwing up a link in a recognizably standard way.