Locating new feeds

Discovering New Feeds

Hopefully by now you can see the appeal of subscribing to syndicated content. Maybe you're hooked by now and in dire need of new feeds. You can visit the following sites to find new RSS feeds: http://www.2rss.com/ (Directory, Software and Articles about RSS, Portal) http://www.blogarama.com/ (yet another blog directory).

But if you're like me, most of the feeds you will find will be by word of mouth. Or should I say "word of blog"? You see, most blogs often have what is called a blog roll. Basically it is a list of blogs read by the author of the blog. Also, many blog entries will refer to other blogs.

RssBandit has a very neat feature that will automatically discover RSS Feeds for these blogs. Say you're reading the latest installment of my riveting blog, and I link to David Winer's blog. RssBandit is in the background also reading the blog, looking for links to other RSS feeds. If you look up in the toolbar of RssBandit and you may notice that there's an icon with an orange XML with the number 1 in front of it.

The number 1 represents the number of feeds that RssBandit found. Click on it and you'll see a list of the feeds that RssBandit has recently discovered (Figure 1).

Discovered Feeds
Figure 1. Auto Discovered Feeds.

In the screenshot above, you can see that "Scripting News" was discovered. Clicking a discovered feed opens the Add New Feed dialog box with its fields pre-populated with the information needed to subscribe to the feed.

Searching Using The Add Subscription Dialog 

Another way to discover new feeds is to use the Add Subscription Dialog to search for feeds based on keywords or topics.  To get to the Add Subscription Dialog, click on Locate Feed (CTRL+S) within the Tools menu.  An alternate means is to select New Subscription from within the File menu and check the option labelled "I want to search for subscriptions by key word(s)".

Whichever method you choose, the Add Subscription dialog will appear and you'll see the screen in figure 2.

New Subscription By Search Dialog.
Figure 2. Add Subscription By Search Dialog.

This dialog lets you choose a search engine to search for rss feeds.  Clicking on the Manage button gives options for adding and removing search engine choices.  For more on this, read the topic Adding Integration with your Favorite Search Engine.

Typing in the words "RSS Bandit" in the keyword topic and clicking Next brings up the search results dialog as in figure 3.

Scan a web page for RSS Feeds
Figure 3. Feed Search Result dialog.

Click on the feed you wish to subscribe to and click next.  Follow the instructions in the rest of the dialog screens to subscribe to the feed. The topic Subscribing to a Feed describes the rest of the wizard starting at figure 5.