In 2023, I published an article about subscribing to author or taxonomic RSS/ATOM feeds (e.g., categories or tags) for websites for which you may be interested in reading one writer or section but not another. My favorite example is for the New York Post. I read the Metro section but am not interested in most of the rest of the publication (although it is sometimes amusing). Because the New York Post is built on WordPress, it offers author- and taxonomy-specific feeds. I take advantage of that to subscribe to the Metro section feed in my feed reader. In the case of the New York Post and other examples in my 2023 article, subscribing to a taxonomy feed instead of the main site feed is a matter of preference. I recently encountered two cases where subscribing to a taxonomy feed is essential for being able to follow a website from a feed reader. In the first case, the main site feed is an unwieldy mess. In the second case, the main site feed does not exist at all. Below, I will discuss these two cases with the goal of helping my fellow RSS/ATOM/JSON feed fans.
Prefatory Notes
If you are not familiar with feeds and feed reader as a general matter, I recommend starting with my gentle introduction to feeds and feed formats.
The two examples I use in this article are websites based on WordPress (as is much of the web). As I discussed in our feed directory page (The New Leaf Journal is also built on WordPress), WordPress offers different feed formats for websites by default. The main site feed is {siteurl.com}/feed and authors, categories, and tags have feeds following the same format. The atom feed is available by adding /atom after /feed (there are other more niche feed formats offered by default). However, just because a site is built on WordPress does not mean it will offer feeds. WordPress has a toggle to disable feeds universally and it is possible to selectively disable different kinds of feeds. Moreover, WordPress sites may offer different numbers of articles in feeds and decide between full text or excerpt feeds. Finally, some WordPress admins disable the on-site feeds and use a third-party, most commonly FeedBurner (which has not been killed by Google yet, albeit it may be on life support), to deliver feeds to subscribers.
WordPress gives a great amount of flexibility to site administrators in the area of feeds, so while there is an expected feed format for WordPress sites, results may vary.
Example One: Messy Full Site Feed
I recently sought to add the main site feed for Pew Research Center to my feed reader. To Pew Research Center’s great credit, it advertises its RSS feed in the “Follow Us” section of the site footer along with links to its various social media presences. Since Pew Research Center is a standard WordPress site, its main site feed follows the expected format:
https://www.pewresearchcenter.org/feed
This seemed simple enough, so I added the feed to my feed reader. My feed reader (Miniflux) recognized the feed and populated the feed with recent articles, as one would expect. The problem with the feed is not a technical one, but rather how it presents the organization’s reports.
Understanding why Pew Research Center’s main site feed is sub-par requires understanding how it publishes its reports. For those who are not familiar with the organization, Pew Research Center conducts polling on many topics of interest and then puts together detailed reports based on its polling results. The problem for its main site feed is that these reports often consist of multiple web pages, effectively consisting of collections of individual articles.
The first four items in the feed are titled, from most recent to oldest (all published on the same day):
- Appendix: Detailed Tables
- Acknowledgments
- Methodology
- Online Scams and Attacks in America Today
All four of these feed items are part of Pew Research Center’s July 31, 2025 report titled Online Scams and Attacks in America Today. The feed item with that name is the front page of Pew Research Center’s report along with the main summary. The next three pages in the main feed are subsequent pages of the report. The subsequent pages show up above the main page in my feed reader (and, I will venture, most feed readers) by default because they were published after the main page.
Opinions may differ, but I only want the first page of the report in my feed reader. Note in the below screen shot that the original website neatly displays links to the rest of the report from the bottom of each page.
I do not need the sub pages of the report cluttering the feed reader, especially when they show up by default in the reverse of their intended order. I am content with reading the first page in my feed reader (I will go so far as to say that with all of its charts, Pew Research Center is a website best visited directly or at least through a good read it later interface instead of through the feed reader). I can then navigate to the rest of the report if I want to go into more granular detail about the subject. If you happen to prefer ensuring that you can read the whole report in your feed reader, you may be content with the main Pew Research Center feed.
Fortunately, because Pew Research Center is built on WordPress, it is easy to fetch the feed I want. Pew Research Center has a category called “Publications” which includes the first pages of its reports along with articles from its “Short Reads” section. The URL is:
https://www.pewresearch.org/publications
Knowing that Pew is a WordPress site, we can add /feed/ (or /feed/atom/ for the ATOM feed) to the Publications section URL.
https://www.pewresearch.org/publications/feed
Perfect! Now I have a feed which shows nothing but the main page of Pew Research Center reports and its short reads.
(Pew Research Center also advertises a “Firehose” feed at “/feed/firehouse/ which appears to include all publication pages and short reads, so this may be the best option for people who want the publications separated along with everything else.)
My take-away from my own Pew Research Center experience is that when I do not like a main site feed for organizational reasons, it is worth poking around the site to see if it offers alternative feeds which may present the same content more neatly. While I was able to find a solution for Pew Research Center quickly because WordPress feeds are predictable, many non-WordPress websites run by feed-conscious webmasters and administrators offer sub-feeds and taxonomic feeds as well.
Example Two: Main Site Feed Does Not Exist, But Taxonomic Feeds Do
Some websites advertise empty main site feeds. By advertise, I mean the feed is included in the page header (you can see this by viewing the page source), and feed readers or tools with autodiscover feed URLs in pages will pick it up. By empty site feed, I mean the feed URL exists but it is not populated by feed items.
The empty main feed issue popped up for one site I recently came across and wanted to subscribe to. I tried adding the site to Miniflux. Miniflux recognized the main site feed with the standard WordPress URL feed format. I added the feed and was disappointed to see that there were no posts. I opened the feed in a web browser and found, unsurprisingly, that while the feed existed, it was empty. My next thought was to try the Google News trick I described in a recent post for obtaining feeds for sites which do not offer them or block my feed reader, but Google News did not pick up the most recent posts from the site.
It then occurred to me that since this website was built on WordPress, it would be worth seeing if the feeds for categories I was interested in would work. (Note that I am not going to name the specific site because I do not want to inadvertently prompt it to eliminate its taxonomy feeds.) For the purpose of this exercise, let us assume that the URL of this site is:
{emptymainfeedsite.com}
So when we use the {emptymainfeedsite.com}/feed URL, we see no news items. But Empty Main Feed Site has two categories I am interested in. The first category is called News and the category archive page is found at {emptymainfeedsite.foo}/news. Knowing that this is a WordPress site, I affixed feed to the category archive instead of the base URL. Our feed URL is {emptymainfeedsite.com}/news/feed.
Fortunately, the category feed was populated with the all of the new articles in the category in question in reverse chronological order. There was a second category on the site I was interested in, so I tried the same thing for that and it also worked just as I wanted it to.
The lesson here is that where a site advertises an empty feed, it is worth checking to see if there may be some working un-advertised feeds on the site. The trick I just demonstrated is somewhat WordPress-specific since the site in question is built on WordPress and uses WordPress’s default feed URL scheme. But it may be applicable to other sites which may have working feeds in unexpected places.
Conclusion
If you rely on a feed reader for staying on top of interesting writing and reading from around the web, you will most likely eventually encounter issues with specific sites you want to follow. Occasionally, you may come across a more novel issue than the problems I focused on in my article on site-specific Google News feeds (site does not offer feeds or site blocks your specific feed reader). The two scenarios in this article represent what I consider to be relatively unusual feed problem cases. Understanding how WordPress feeds work by default guided me to a solution.
