(Guide/Review) Get RSS feed URLs from any page and preview them using the Want My RSS extension for Firefox

[Karlston]

Get RSS feed URLs from any page and preview them using the Want My RSS extension for Firefox

When you are on a website, and want to see if it offers an RSS feed that you may want to subscribe to, what do you do? Usually the best way is to look for the RSS icon on the page. IF there is none, you could check the source or try common feed URLs direclty, e.g. by appending /feed/ to to the domain.

 

https://www.ghacks.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Want-My-RSS-icon.jpg

 

Want my RSS is a Firefox extension that aims to simplify this task.

 

Install the add-on and visit any web page. You'll notice an RSS icon (next to the bookmark icon) in the address bar. Click on the icon and a small pop-up appears, that lists the available RSS feeds.

 

Mouse over the RSS feed that you want to access. Left-click on it and Want My RSS will open load the page in its feed previewer. Another way to do this is to click the RSS Feed URL on the website, or simply open the feed's link, it will be loaded in the extension's previewer.

 

 

Use it to read the latest articles on the website. This includes the images that were included in the posts, but videos aren't displayed in the previewer. Click on an article's title/URL to load it normally.

 

By default, the add-on uses "Relative time" (like an hour ago) to indicate when an article was published in the feed that you're viewing. Uncheck the box next to "Relative time" to view the exact time stamp when the post was published to the feed.

 

Use the sort box near the top corner in the feed previewer to sort the articles by Newest or Oldest. See that icon to the right of the articles? Click on it to switch to the day or night theme, which changes the background color of the Want My RSS previewer page. Do note that this isn't a full-fledged RSS reader extension by any means (for starters it lacks notifications). You may want to try something like Smart RSS or Feedbro for a proper feed reader.

 

 

Or, click on the icon next to the Subscribe button to choose from a list of feed readers: Feedly, The Old Reader, InoReader, News Blur, Netvibes, BazQux, Feedbin, G2Reader, CommaFeed, Nooshub.

 

If you don't use any of those, scroll to the top of the preview page. The add-on displays the name and the link of the RSS feed in the top left corner. Mouse over near the URL to view the URL and copy it. Now, you can use it to subscribe to the feed in any feed reader of your choice.

 

The add-on doesn't work perfectly with all sites. E.g. For some reason, it doesn't pick up gHacks' feed, i.e. the Want My RSS button doesn't appear in the address bar. Another thing that I observed was the "Subscribe to page" option that appears when clicking on the three-dot icon in the address-bar. The option was grayed out.

 

 

However, clicking on the blog's feed button loaded it in the previewer.

 

 

I also noticed an issue with some websites where the extension would not load the preview (for e.g. the European PlayStation blog).

Other options

Open the add-on's page to define the rules for custom feeds. If you don't want the extension to load the preview of feeds, disable the "Intercept requests" option. Toggle the "open popup feeds in a new tab" option to force Want My RSS to load a feed in a new tab. It's useful when you don't want to navigate away from the source website.

 

Want My RSS is an open source extension.

 

Landing Page: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/want-my-rss/

 

 

Source: Get RSS feed URLs from any page and preview them using the Want My RSS extension for Firefox (gHacks - Ashwin)