RSS feeds are a great way to pipe information from one application to another without relying on a lot of complicated programming and APIs. You can use feeds to send content to feed readers or news aggregators. You can also get updates from a site without constantly visiting it. However, it’s not always easy to figure out the feed for content from a site.
To get you started, here’s how to get RSS feeds from some of your favorite services.
RSS feeds for Known
Let’s begin with an obvious one. You can get an RSS feed for lots of things in Known. Just about everything you publish will have an associated feed.
The feed URL for all public things published from your site looks like this:
https:/
Or you can use this one:
https:/
Feeds for specific types of content follow these patterns:
https:/
https:/
https:/
https:/
https:/
https:/
https:/
If you want a feed for a specific hashtag that you use, try this pattern:
https:/
And if you’re looking for a feed for content published by a specific user on your site, use this URL pattern:
https:/
So basically, you can add the extension ?_t=rss to almost any URL from Known, and it will generate a feed.
RSS feeds for Instagram
Instagram doesn’t provide an RSS feed of your images, but you can generate a feed by relying on some other services that use the Instagram API.
To get an RSS feed of your photos (or photos from someone else’s account) add the username to this URL:
http:/
So mine is http:/
RSS feeds for Pinterest
Pinterest does provide RSS feeds for your pins, but you might not have known about it!
To get a feed of your pins add your username to this URL:
https:/
Mine is https:/
To get a feed from a pinboard, add .rss to the end of the board URL like this:
https:/
The feed for one of my boards is at https:/
RSS feeds for Pinboard
There are a variety of feed options if you use Pinboard to save bookmarks.
To get an RSS feed of everything that you’ve saved add your username to this URL:
http:/
To get an RSS feed of everything that you’ve saved with a specific tag, add your username and tag to this URL:
http:/
If you want to view more options for feeds from Pinboard, check out the “Feeds and Syndication” section of their how-to page.
RSS feeds for Pocket
Pocket is a great service if you want to save up longer articles to read on the weekend or during your workday commute.
If you want to be extra circuitous, you can even send posts that you star in a feed reader to Pocket, and then generate a feed of those articles in Pocket, which you could subscribe to in a feed reader. I’m not sure if anyone does that though.
To get the RSS feed of everything you save to your list in Pocket add your username to the following URL:
http:/
To get more options, such as an RSS feed for your archives in Pocket, visit their RSS support page.
RSS feeds for Instapaper
Instapaper is another great site that a lot of people use to save articles to read later. Like Pocket, you can get an RSS feed of the articles that you save to your account. However, it’s not as obvious.
If you’re using a feed reader that does a good job of detecting feeds, you might be able to log into Instapaper and drop the Instapaper URL into the feed reader to detect it.
If not, here’s what to do. Log into Instapaper. You should be on https:/
You’re looking for a line that’s like:
Your URL will have different numbers and letters.
Take that URL path and add it to instapaper.com to get your RSS feed. So in the example above, you’d have:
https:/
That's it for now! What other services do you like that have useful RSS feeds?