Doing it by hand instead
Add /feed, /rss, /feed.xml or /atom.xml to the end of the site address. WordPress sites answer to /feed almost every time.
morss.it went offline and took a lot of homemade feeds with it. I watched someone on r/rss get handed a twelve-step server plan by a chatbot to replace it. You do not need a server or any technical setup. Check the site first. If there is truly no feed, two free hosted tools make one and Muuted reads it.
Paste the site into the checker below; if it truly has no feed, two hosted tools build one and Muuted reads it.
Most sites still publish one. They just stopped putting a button on it.
Paste the normal website address here. The checker reads the page for a feed link and tries the ten places feeds usually hide. If it finds one, you are done. If the site truly has none, it tries the three selectors below on the page for you and hands you a ready-made RSS-Bridge feed, so you never have to face that form.
Nothing is stored. The check runs on Cloudflare’s edge, not on your device, so it works the same from a phone.
Add /feed, /rss, /feed.xml or /atom.xml to the end of the site address. WordPress sites answer to /feed almost every time.
Search the page for “RSS” or “Subscribe”. The link is usually in the footer, in the same grey text as the privacy policy.
A site may have a feed for its blog or a category even when the home page does not. Same address pattern, one folder deeper.
Paste the site address into the search box in Muuted. It checks for a real feed first, then the publisher’s own news sitemap where one exists — the reason sites like BBC and Reuters come back with current stories even with no RSS — then offers to build one from the page’s headlines, marked Built in the results. One tap and the site is a normal source.
You are not choosing a technology stack. You are trying to get one feed address.
Open RSS is a free hosted service that builds feeds for sites that do not have them. Using it is one edit to the address bar: put openrss.org/ in front of the site’s domain, without the https://. So example.com becomes openrss.org/example.com.
Success looks like a plain page of recent items, or a page of XML. Either one is a feed. Copy the address from your browser and paste it into Muuted.
RSS-Bridge is the open-source project that r/rss thread was about. What the chatbot plan skipped is that the project runs a public instance with 548 bridges switched on. A bridge is a ready-made recipe for one kind of site: Twitch, YouTube, Instagram, Bandcamp, Telegram channels and a few hundred more. First, search that page for the site’s name. If there is a bridge, fill in its one or two fields, press Generate feed, and copy the address it gives you.
For a plain website with no bridge of its own, use the one called CSS Selector. Two fields matter the first time. Site URL is the page that lists the newest articles, usually the home page or the blog index. Selector for article links tells the bridge which links on the page are the stories. This is the only part that is real work. Try these one at a time and stop when one returns stories:
Leave every optional field alone. Press Generate feed, pick Atom or RSS, and copy the address. That address is your feed.
If you are already a Muuted user you can skip the two tools above: paste the site itself and take the Built result. Otherwise, open the search box, paste the Open RSS or RSS-Bridge address (not the original website address), and add it. From then on the site is a normal source. Its stories sit in your feed next to your other sites, YouTube channels and podcasts. Your muted words apply to it, the junk filters apply to it, and when you have read everything Muuted tells you that you are caught up. If the generated feed ever stops producing stories, the source shows as quiet so you know to check the tool, not the site.
If the goal is to follow one stubborn website, use the hosted tools. Self-hosting is a separate hobby.
The plan in that thread had you open a public server, then bolt on batching scripts, a cache and a home-made login to protect it. The people who actually run RSS-Bridge called it overengineered, and they were right. The hosted instance already exists. Use it.
There are paid feed builders with nicer forms. Try Open RSS and the public bridge first. Pay only if you outgrow them.
If the page shows a “checking your browser” screen, no feed tool will get through, hosted or not. The checker above tells you when that is the case. Find the site’s newsletter or its social account instead, both of which have feeds.
If you truly want your own private RSS-Bridge, PikaPods will run one for you for a few dollars a month with no terminal. That is the version of self-hosting I would take.
The parts people usually wonder about.
No. The checker above, Open RSS and the public RSS-Bridge instance are all hosted by someone else. You only need a server if you later decide you want to run RSS-Bridge yourself, and even then PikaPods will do it for a few dollars a month with no terminal.
If the address opens as a plain list of recent posts or a page of XML, and Muuted accepts it as a source, you have a feed. The checker at the top of this page will confirm it too: paste the new address in and it should say found.
It does now, for the common case — that is Feed Builder. Paste a site into the search box in Muuted and it tries a real feed first, then the publisher’s own news sitemap where one exists, then builds a feed from the page’s own headline links: titles and links only, never the article text. What it still will not do is fight a page behind a login, a bot check, or one that draws its headlines with JavaScript. The two tools above exist for those harder cases, and for anyone reading somewhere other than Muuted.
Check the generated feed address itself first. If the site redesigned, a CSS Selector feed may need one of the other two selectors. If the hosted service is down, wait and try again. Muuted shows a source as quiet when it stops producing stories, so you will notice.
Yes. The checker and Open RSS only involve pasting an address. RSS-Bridge is more comfortable on a bigger screen but works on a phone too.
Pages behind a login or a paywall, pages that show a bot check before the content, and pages that draw their headlines with JavaScript after loading. If a tool cannot see the headlines in the raw page, there is no feed to make. Look for the site's newsletter or social account instead, both of which have feeds.
Muuted reads your sites, channels and podcasts in one feed, lets you mute the words you are done with, and tells you when you are caught up. Free for up to 100 sources.