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.
