1

I have a website that I would like to subscribe to via my RSS reader. The website itself doesn't publicize its RSS feed, however when I used Google Reader it was able to find one, and it works perfectly well. Google Reader cites http://www.stratfor.com/rss.xml as the address for the RSS feed. However, when I try to enter that feed, it says "Page not found". I suspect that this is because that file does exist on the website, but is forbidden; and that for some weird reason google reader has access to it. Is that the case?

Anyways, I would really like my own RSS reader to be able to subscribe to it, because it has functionalities that Google reader does not. Besides, it intrigues me -- how come Google reader can read it, but other RSS reader cannot?

Nicole
  • 111

1 Answers1

2

If you look in the page source, you will find:

<head profile="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml/vocab">
....
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Stratfor RSS" href="http://www.stratfor.com/rss.xml" />
....

And I believe Google Reader uses a different user agent which is not blocked by the site

http://www.useragentstring.com/pages/Feed%20Readerlist/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=178852#often

I think it's an oversight of the page admin or a bug in drupal (website engine). That RSS feed should probably not be readable by google either.

Calin
  • 61