Creating Custom Feeds For Sites Without Feeds

Whiiiiiiinnnnneee! Why don’t more websites and blogs have feeds? Don’t you know what a feed is yet?

Feeds are wonderful things. They allow us to keep up with the Joneses through our feed readers, bringing the latest updated information from a blog or website to our doorstep.

Yahoo News Feed Link Unfortunately, not every website or blog has a feed. BUT! There is a way around this horrid lack of feeds.

You can use Yahoo News, Google News, and Google Blogsearch to set up custom feeds which will report on any updates added to these search engines, creating a form of custom feed for those sites.

Google News Custom Feed To use these, go to the news search engine of your choice and type in the search term that will get you that person or site. For our example, let’s set up a custom feed for “Matt Mullenweg”.

Type in “Matt Mullenweg” with or without the quote marks. If it comes up “We did not find results…” ignore it and look for the View as RSS, XML, Atom, RSS, or similar links or logos. Click on these, or right click and copy and paste these feed links into your feed reader, and you have a custom feed for that search combination.

Google Blog Search Custom Feed You can limit the keywords to only include information for a specific site, but often you will get other off-site search results included. Still, it might help you track information about what others are saying about this person or website.

To help you out with my own blog, Lorelle on WordPress, here are the list of feeds you can use to track what’s being said on and what is being said about “Lorelle on WordPress”:

You can find more feed options for Lorelle on WordPress on my About page and Site Map, including feeds by category.

And for a list of tons of feeds and resources to monitor for blog stories and content, check out Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog – Tracking Stories.

Site Search Tags: feeds, what are feeds, custom feeds, websites without feeds, blogs without feeds, how to make a feed, make a custom feed, feed tips, feed help, blogging tips, blog tips, blog help, blogging help
Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, member of the 9Rules Network

Member of the 9Rules Blogging Network

10 Comments

basu715

Posted January 14, 2007 at 9:13 am | Permalink

I was wondering, do you know a way to block the WordPress.com feed and replace it with a FeedBurner feed?

Lorelle VanFossen

Posted January 14, 2007 at 11:48 am | Permalink

You can’t “block” or stop or change your WordPress.com feed to replace it with a Feedburner feed, but you can add one. I have one in my sidebar. Just add the link to your Feedburner feed to your Blogroll. Very simple.

frustrated reader

Posted January 15, 2007 at 1:28 pm | Permalink

But will those RSS workarounds give you full content RSS feeds? There’s nothing more annoying, and this blog falls into the annoying category, of partial/abstract RSS feeds that still require you to spawn multiple windows and tabs in a browser to see the content.

How does one get a full RSS feed using those tools. Now that would be an awesome “fix”!

Mythophile

Posted January 15, 2007 at 2:42 pm | Permalink

More importantly, why aren’t there more georss feeds? You’d think every weather and geological site with info that needs constant updating would be jumping all over georss. How am I supposed to get data to make a cool Yahoo map.

Tom

Posted January 15, 2007 at 9:35 pm | Permalink

I recently wanted to add a separate blog feed to my podcast site, but couldn’t figure out how to do it exclusive of the podcast feed.

When I set up my podcast site, I used Feedburner. Every category was routed through the Feedburner feed. I wanted to add another feed that would just contain blog posts. Since I blog daily, I didn’t want to blast everyone who was subscribed to the podcast. I wanted my blog feed to be separate from my podcast feed.

However, I could not figure out how to exclude the blog feed from the Feedburner podcast feed. I tried using the Category Visibility plugin, but it wouldn’t let me subscribe to anything excluded from the podcast feed. The user forums were also not helpful. Any category-specific feeds are automatically included in the site feed. Do you know how to do this?

On another note, I’m curious about something on your site. Is your site a WordPress.com site or a custom installation on your own web host (wordpress.org)? It seems like you have some customizations (e.g., related articles, tag warrior, custom signature) that I wasn’t aware were available from the WordPress.com version.

Lorelle VanFossen

Posted January 15, 2007 at 11:00 pm | Permalink

This is a WordPress.com blog and I’m limited to the same limitations everyone else is. The tags and signature are created manually for every post. See A Technorati Tag Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users for specifics.

As for your feeds, I’m not sure where you went wrong, but any category can have its own individual feeds, and that’s what I assume you want. I gather you have your podcasts in their own “podcast” category or some such similar. So put your blog posts in a different category and offer that feed to your users.

See Customizing RSS Feed Links for WordPress and WordPress.com Blogs for details on creating category feeds.

Kyle

Posted January 16, 2007 at 6:47 pm | Permalink

Thanks for the post Lorelle. I’m sure this will be quite handy for something.

Basu715,
Is this what you are after? feed replacement plugin

Ed

Posted January 17, 2007 at 3:09 pm | Permalink

I ran across a web based tool called PonyFish (RSS Feed Builder)—seems to be generating quite a buzz as a solution for sites without feeds:
http://www.ponyfish.com/

Raul

Posted February 5, 2007 at 4:32 pm | Permalink

I use http://www.feedity.com which is a really simple and great tool

Kate

Posted June 28, 2009 at 1:14 am | Permalink

Thanks! I was able to grab news from a site without a feed in 5 minutes thanks to your tip

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