RSS1 used to be THE thing to follow people all around. It has a gargantuan advantage compared to any "Follow" button on any website: it used to be platform and service independent but centralized in your chosen RSS reader. The reader crawled all the RSS feeds you were "following" from all around the internet - and that's it. Like e-mail. And it's also the easiest way to anonymously stalk around. Since Google phased out it's Reader, RSS slowly started to fade out but some other services still have it - and it's good for you.
The Good
Below the services who play nice and do show the RSS feed URLs in the gallery/page/portfolio site source code - only none of the "modern" browsers care anymore to show the RSS icon in the toolbar.
deviantArt
http://backend.deviantart.com/rss.xml?q=gallery%3AUSERNAME.
gallery: becomes gallery%3A due to the URL
encoding; only replace the USERNAME with the deviantArt
username.
Tumblr
http://USERNAME.tumblr.com/rss
Tumblr is one of the exceptions: most of the themes still have the RSS logo with the RSS link underneath it.
WordPress
WordPress ( both .com and hosted sites ) nearly always have RSS feeds for the site, for the categories, the tags; even for comments, sitewise and per entry.
Examples:
- full site feed
-
http://USERNAME.wordpress.com/comments/feed - full comments feed
-
http://USERNAME.wordpress.com/comments/feed - category feed
-
http://USERNAME.wordpress.com/category/CATEGORYNAME/feed - post specific comments feed
-
http://USERNAME.wordpress.com/URL/TO/THE/POST/feed
Blogspot.com
http://USERNAME.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
The Ugly
The following sites are not really announcing - or not the way they should, within the actual page - the following RSS feed options.
Flickr
To get the feed of a single person use:
https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?lang=en-us&format=rss_200&id=USERID.
Unfortunately, the USERID is not the username, and to get the actual ID you either need to need to use the Flickr API or visit a 3rd party service, like http://idgettr.com/. At least you can specify set IDs as well to follow, the details are at https://www.flickr.com/services/feeds/.
There is also a way to get the feed of everyone you follow:
https://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_friends.gne?lang=en-us&format=rss_200&id=USERID
but in this case, USERID should be your own ID.
Behance
https://www.behance.net/USERNAME.xml
Replace USERNAME with the Behance portfolio owner's username.
http://www.pinterest.com/USERNAME/BOARDNAME.rss
to get the feed of a specific board. I could not find the way to get a feed of all boards of a user.
http://widget.websta.me/rss/n/USERNAME
will get a user's feed.
And the Bad
Nope. No RSS. Nothing to see here.
Google+
There never was one.
Footnotes
There is a small software, rss2email2 that can parse RSS feeds and convert the entries to e-mails; I'm still using it, and it's great. No missed posts, no looking around for updates, just new messages in my Inbox. Also, 2.70 works better for me than 2.71.
(Oh, by the way: this entry was written by Peter Molnar, and originally posted on petermolnar dot net.)
