A lot of sites still have RSS feeds, they just don't show you where they are. Here's how to get feeds for three of them, plus somefree tools I've put together that do it for you.
YouTube channels
Every YouTube channel has an RSS feed. The format is:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=CHANNEL_ID
The catch is that you need the channel ID (it starts with UC), not the @handle. To find it, open the channel page, view the page source and search for "externalId". The 24-character value starting with UC is the ID.
The feed has the 15 most recent uploads. Playlists work too:
https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PLAYLIST_ID
If you don't want to dig through page source, this does the lookup for you: YouTube RSS feed finder
Telegram channels
Telegram doesn't offer RSS, but public channels have a web preview at:
https://t.me/s/CHANNEL_NAME
That page has the latest ~20 posts in plain HTML, and you can page back with ?before=POST_ID. It only works for public channels. Private channels, groups and bots don't have one.
I made a tool that turns that preview into a proper RSS feed. The URL is just:
https://purfled.com/rss/telegram/CHANNEL_NAME
So you can paste it straight into a feed reader. More details here: Telegram channel to RSS
Google News
Google News still has RSS for searches, it's just undocumented:
https://news.google.com/rss/search?q=YOUR+SEARCH&hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en
Search operators work inside q, e.g. site:bbc.co.uk, intitle:, "exact phrase", and when:7d for the last week. Change hl, gl and ceid for other countries and languages.
Topic feeds look like this:
https://news.google.com/rss/headlines/section/topic/TECHNOLOGY?hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en
(WORLD, NATION, BUSINESS, TECHNOLOGY, ENTERTAINMENT, SPORTS, SCIENCE, HEALTH.)
There's a form that builds these URLs for you here: Google News RSS builder
The rest
All of these are on purfled.com, along with a YouTube channel ID finder, a thumbnail downloader, and CSV exporters for Telegram channels and Substack archives. They're free with no sign up.
To be upfront: this is partly a side income experiment, and there are paid versions on Apify for bigger jobs (full channel histories, running on a schedule). Please give me any feedback, however big or small. I'm excited to add some more tools.
