Virtual Curiosities

Why RSS Guard Adds The Same Feed Repeated Five Times

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When adding a new RSS feed to RSS Guard using a webpage's URL, sometimes the same title is repeated five times, and the same title AND type (RSS 2.0/2.0.1) appears repeated three times! Why does this happen? What is the reason for all these duplicated feeds? And which of these feeds should you select?

Most likely what happened is that the URL you tried to add to RSS Guard belong to a website made with WordPress.

A dialog window titled "Discover feeds." It has a field "URL," value: www.virtualcuriosities.com. A button reads "Discover!" An unchecked checkbox: Recursive discovery (can take some time for bigger websites). A frame (discovered feeds). Target parent folder: Me (RSS/ATOM/JSON). Two buttons for the list: Select all, unselect all. A list with two columns, Title and Type. Six items: Virtual Curiosities (feed), type: RDF (RSS 1.0). Same title, type: RSS 2.0/2.0.1. Comments for Virtual Curiosities (feed), same type. Virtual curiosities (feed), same type. Same title and same type. Same title, type: ATOM 1.0. Two buttons: "Add single feed with advanced details" and "Import checked feeds." Two buttons at the end of the dialog: "Switch to advanced mode" and "Close."
The "Discover feeds" dialog of RSS Guard, showing feeds discovered from a URL of a website made with WordPress.

By default, a WordPress website will have in its homepage a declaration that says it supports RSS. This declaration will announce two feeds: an RSS feed for all articles posted in the website, and an RSS feed for all comments posted on the website, in this order.

Some RSS clients will see these declarations and only add the first feed (e.g. Akregator). Some RSS clients will display a list of feed for you to choose from (e.g. NewsFlash). This means all they do is check the HTML code of the webpage for these declarations. See [How Adding RSS Feeds from Webpage URLs Works] for details on how this is done. RSS Guard does a bit more than just that.

A dropdown menu listing two options: "Virtual Curiosities » Feed - RSS" and "Virtual Curiosities » Comments Feed - RSS." A submenu displays two options: "Preview" and "Subscribe."
Vivaldi's dropdown menu that appears when one webpage has multiple RSS feeds associated with it. These two options should appear on all websites made with WordPress in its default settings.

Besides checking the HTML, RSS Guard also tries a few common URLs to see if it can find any feeds. That's a good idea because there's a chance the website supports RSS, but someone forgot to add the declarations, so the RSS feeds would still be working, they just wouldn't be linked to by any page.

In fact, besides the RSS format, WordPress also supports RDF and ATOM formats for syndicated feeds, but it doesn't link to them by default, it only links to the RSS version.

When you see the same feed with the same title and tree different types, RSS 2.0/2.0.1, ATOM 1.0, and RDF (RSS 1.0), that's because one of them has the URL path /feed/, the other is /feed/atom/, and the last one is /feed/rdf/. They're slightly different formats for the same thing.

I've read that the ATOM format is the best one, but for some reason it's not the default in WordPress.

That solves one mystery, but what about the three feeds that have the same title AND the same type? What's the difference between them? How do you know which one to choose?

The reason why the same feed appears three times is that RSS Guard tried two URLs that redirected to the same feed. More specifically, RSS Guard tried to find a feed at the URL path /rss and /feed. When you access those paths in a WordPress website, WordPress responds with 301 MOVED PERMANENTLY and tells the location where the resource is found is /feed/. In other words, if you go to /rss, you'll be redirected to /feed/.

In fact, the same occurs with the ATOM and RDF results.

In summary:

  1. One is /feed/ as declared by the webpage.
  2. One is /feed that redirected to /feed/.
  3. One is /rss that redirected to /feed/.
  4. One is /atom that redirected to /feed/atom/.
  5. One is /rdf that redirected to /feed/rdf/.

You can click on the button "Add single feed with advanced details" to inspect what URL RSS Guard used to find each feed.

Ideally, in cases like this you should add canonical URL of the RSS feed, and not a URL that redirects to the feed. For example, it could be that in the future /rss stops working and only /feed/ works, so the ideal would be to add /feed/, not /rss.

However, I don't think it's something worth worrying about and you can just add any of them. If it stops working later, you can just change the URL to /feed/ and it should start working again.

Observations

RSS Guard doesn't indicate that a redirection occurred. Honestly, I don't think it should be showing repeated feeds at all, specially considering these are permanent 301 redirects, not temporary 302 redirects.

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