Tag Archives: RSS

How to Get RSS Working in Firefox 64

As of Firefox 64, the ability to preview RSS feeds natively has been removed, which kind of sucks. I get why they did it though (or do I? Hmmm…).  Anyway, to get the functionality back, you need to install one or more add-ons.  Since Firefox 63 came out which lost the ability to detect RSS feeds, a lot of RSS feed related extensions have started appearing.

Firefox RSS Detection
Firefox RSS Detection using Awesome RSS

At the moment, I am using Awesome RSS to add an RSS Feed indicator to the Location bar and RSSPreview to preview the feed much like before.  For this to work, the RSS option needs to be selected in the Subscribe Using option of Awesome RSS. There might be a better option but these work for now for my needs. For those that use Feedly, Awesome RSS does have a Feedly option as well.

Hopefully this helps anyone that’s missing the RSS functionality. 🙂

How to Get RSS Feeds For All Your YouTube Subscriptions

Update January 21, 2023: Suppose I should mention that this no longer works and probably hasn’t for some time. Looks like they removed the Export to RSS Readers option (boo!). The individual YouTube channels do still have RSS Feed links in them and RSS feed detection extensions in browsers should detect them (RSSPreview for Firefox does). Might need to refresh the channel page for them to see the correct one.


This is a follow-up to my post How to Get a YouTube Channel’s RSS Feed. I actually stumbled onto this by accident (by clicking on the red SUBSCRIPTIONS link in the left-hand menu it would seem). You need to go to https://www.youtube.com/subscription_manager on YouTube and at the bottom you will see Export to RSS readers with an Export subscriptions button on the right. After clicking the button it will download a XML file to your system.

Next, if you happen to be using Feedly, you can now import all of your YouTube RSS feeds at once by going to the Organize Sources section which should be at https://feedly.com/i/organize and clicking the Import OPML button on the top-right and selecting the XML file you just downloaded from YouTube. There you go! 🙂 Other RSS readers should have a similar import mechanism. Hope this helped someone.

How to Force Feedly to See Latest Posts in a Feed

I was trying to add a new YouTube feed into Feedly and noticed that what Feedly was seeing was not matching what my browser saw. In fact, the newest post Feedly displayed was 297 days old. The specific feed in this case was the one for Mike Zeroh’s YouTube Channel whose most recent videos have been about Star Wars and theories concerning the latest movies.

In this instance, the feed URL I was using was:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCoe5Yk15NUniu1xEJ-ylOvQ

which looked like this in Feedly:

Feedly Showing Old Posts in Feed

As you can see, the newest video it sees is from November 2015 even though I could see the most recent ones when previewing the feed in Firefox before adding it to Feedly.

After doing some research, I found someone with the same issue and a workaround: Problem with a Youtube feed not updating. It turns out, you just need to add an extra query parameter to the end of the URL to force Feedly to see the latest posts. So, I modified the URL to: 

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCoe5Yk15NUniu1xEJ-ylOvQ&xray=bob

by adding

&xray=bob

to the end which did the trick! This was just the first thing that came into my head LOL. 🙂

Subsequently, while writing this post, I also realized that the following feed URL also works for his channel:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=drunkchickenTV

Anyway, hope this helps someone who runs across something similar with Feedly! 🙂

How to Get a YouTube Channel’s RSS Feed

Well, I was trying add the PBS Space Time YouTube channel’s RSS feed to my reader like I’ve done with other channels in the past; however, the browser was never detecting the feed and it has seemed problematic with YouTube for sometime. Actually, when I examined the source code, I could not find any reference to a feed for the browser to detect.  So, here’s what I did.

I found a working feed which had a URL like:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=(channel-id)

I then replaced (channel-id) with the one for PBS Space Time which happens to be

UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g

so the complete URL would be:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UC7_gcs09iThXybpVgjHZ_7g

You can find the channel id by looking at the address bar in your browser when looking a the channel’s home. Example:

PBS Space Time channel ID in the browser's address bar.It worked! Hope this helps someone. 🙂


Update September 18, 2016: You can also use the user name that shows in the address bar if it doesn’t have a channel ID. Use user=username to specify the RSS feed. In this case a URL would be like:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?user=periodicvideos


Update April 4, 2017: I found out from here that for a YouTube playlist, use playlist_id. So, for my music video playlist, the URL would be:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?playlist_id=PL8D8D4240EC972114


Update September 5, 2017: Check out my new post: How to Get RSS Feeds For All Your YouTube Subscriptions that describes how to import all your YouTube subscription RSS feeds at once.

How to Add New RSS Feed Into Feedly for Firefox

Update April 2019: Thought I would add that for Firefox 63+, RSSPreview also allows you to preview a feed directly in Firefox and view it’s source code if you want. In order for this to work, you would need to select RSS for the Subscribe Using option in Awesome RSS‘s options.


Update December 2018: For Firefox 63+ they’ve removed most of the RSS handling code and adding these about:config entries don’t do anything now. See: Mozilla plans to remove RSS feed reader and Live Bookmarks support from Firefox – gHacks Tech News. Using Awesome RSS still works though.


Update November 2017: For Firefox 57+ there is now the Feedly Subscribe Button or Awesome RSS extension (which now has a Feedly option). The about:config modifications shown below also still work to add it to Firefox’s list of handlers.


Update November 26, 2013: Feedly changed their URL. They took “cloud” out of the URL. So, the correct URL is now: http://feedly.com/#subscription/feed/%s which I have altered below.

Update July 3, 2013: After reading How to add web services to the RSS signup page? on the mozillaZine forum (and comments below), thought I would put what needs to be done for Feedly here (after they finish re-doing the Firefox extension, none of this should, hopefully, be necessary):

To add a feed handler manually,

  1. Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter.
  2. Press the big button to bypass the warning.
  3. In the search bar, paste browser.contentHandlers.types. and note the highest number of the preferences listed (e.g. browser.contentHandlers.types.5.title)
  4. Right-click somewhere in the lower pane and choose New, then String.
  5. Create preferences with the following values, replacing 6 with the appropriate number in your case. %s is a placeholder for the feed’s URL; Firefox will send that URL to the feed reader website.
    • browser.contentHandlers.types.6.title Feedly
    • browser.contentHandlers.types.6.type application/vnd.mozilla.maybe.feed
    • browser.contentHandlers.types.6.uri https://feedly.com/#subscription/feed/%s
  6. Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

You should now see a Feedly option in your drop-down list for feed readers. 🙂


Update June 25, 2013: Thought I better update this post. Currently Feedly is up to version 16.0.528 of the Firefox extension and I am now running Firefox v22.0. Also, it looks like my account is now completely handled by the Feedly Cloud. As such, my URL to add a RSS feed into Feedly has changed from what is used below. The current URL which I now use when making the bookmark is: http://cloud.feedly.com/#subscription/feed/%s . It also seems like the extension is more of a front-end to the web only version of Feedly that adds some additional abilities over the website by itself. Hopefully this helps others that have been completely moved over to the Feedly cloud. 🙂


Update March 28, 2013: Feedly just released version 14.0 of the extension for Firefox on their site. It does seem to correct the problem with adding new feeds and does seem to fix the Google+ button issue when trying to share with it. It’s got some of its own little quirks (which some may not even notice). Version 10.2 is still available on the Firefox Add-On site (actually, they keep most of the older versions archived).


As most are aware by now, Google has announced that as of July 1st, Google Reader will be shutdown. I have been testing out Feedly as a replacement. If you’re reading this then odds are that you’ve already installed the Feedly Extension for Firefox. At the moment it’s basically a front-end for Google Reader and syncs its content with Google Reader. Changes made in Feedly will appear in Google Reader and visa-versa. More information can be found here on Feedly’s blog: Transitioning from Google Reader to Feedly.

The biggest problem that I and many others have run into is adding new feeds directly into Feedly. The normal process in Firefox usually displays an error like this. Anyway, here’s the easiest way that I’ve found to do it.

First, create a new bookmark of one of your existing Feedly pages or just make a new bookmark of anything really. Then, right-click the bookmark and select properties so that the following dialog is shown:

Bookmark Properties

Like I’ve done, change the Name to something more meaningful, and most importantly, change the Location to http://www.feedly.com/home#subscription/feed/%s be sure to add the “%s” at the end. Then add a keyword, such as “f” like I have done, and click Save. (Note: see the June 25th update at the beginning of this post for the current URL if you’ve been moved over to the Feedly Cloud.)

Now, simply preview the RSS feed you want in Firefox using the normal method or copy the link to an RSS feed. Then in the address bar, either insert a “f(space)” (or whatever keyword you decided on) in front of the URL if it’s already showing or type “f(space)” followed by the URL to the RSS Feed:

Address Bar

After pressing enter, you should see the new page being displayed within Feedly’s context. At this point, just click on the green +Add button:

Add feed to Feedly

Success!! 🙂 (oh, as of this writing I am using Firefox v19.0.2).

Update March 17, 2013: Another work-around is to simply refresh the browser using F5, the address bar’s refresh button, or Feedly’s circular arrow refresh button, if you see that unable to load feed error page. After refreshing it seems to properly decode the URL and display the appropriate content to then add.