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Most of the time you can copy the site's URL into Google Reader and it will try to find the proper RSS feed. It works for blogs hosted on Blogger and Wordpress, at least; not sure how it does it.


"not sure how it does it."

The same way that some browsers do it. There is a meta-tag in the page, which describes which feed formats are available, and where to find them.


<link rel="alternate"> to be precise.


I think it's a bit more than that. It's worked on sites that Safari can't find a feed for, and I presume Safari looks for the meta-tag.


I guess Google Reader uses a database of feeds that other people subscribed to.

For one thing, it shows you the whole history of the feed -- even when the XML itself contains just the few most recent items.


I enter the site name and it works too. Google is good at data parsing :)




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