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by seanzieapples 4719 days ago
I like your app so far but I input https://news.ycombinator.com/ and it's not able to locate an RSS feed (Just says "Loading"). I input https://news.ycombinator.com/rss and it works.
3 comments

Ha!

Well as jerf mentioned below, HN doesn't correctly provide a link reference to its RSS feed. Now that's fine in our case, as a surprisingly large number of websites fail this test, and simply have a visible link with "rss" or "atom" in either the link's text or URL.

Now we pick these up, but in this case the front page of HN has an invalid link with "rss" in the text, namely this very thread itself. So normally the HN front page URL works fine, but right now it doesn't. This gives us a great chance to refine our discovery code a bit, so thank you!

That is one of the coolest bugs I came across lately.
HN does not include the proper metadata to indicate an RSS feed. If

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" 
          title="Hacker News" 
          href="http://news.ycombinator.com/rss" />
was added to the <head> of the homepage, the discovery would probably work better.
Thank you! That's definitely a bug, looking into it :-)