Xanga does RSS ...who knew?

My good friend and flaming liberal (which is a very good thing!), Dr Lavine (listed among the Links over on the right-hand side of this page), has his blog hosted by Xanga. Well, I do the vast majority of my blog reading (and reading of news, for that matter) via an RSS reader (most of the time I use SharpReader, but there are many; my wife uses BottomFeeder on her iBook). And usually, when I want to configure my RSS Reader to pull in the updates from someone's web site, I look for the XML icon or RSS icon or other link on their site indicating the URL for that feed. Or I'll open their site, use the View Source feature to see the HTML behind the scenes, and look for a line containing something like: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://littlejoe.typepad.com/blog/index.rdf" />

The LINK tag with rel="alternate" is what I look for to spot the URL that will point me to the XML feed for a given site, and I then enter that URL into my feed reader so that the site is added to the many sites that I already read from one single aggregator.

But Xanga doesn't make it as obvious, and all this time (years) I've thought that Xanga sites just didn't have RSS or Atom or other XML feeds. Without an RSS feed, I would sometimes go for days without checking the blogs of my Xanga friends. But that has now changed.

Dr Lavine's RSS feed is at http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=blavine ...and the RSS feed for any Xanga site is found at http://www.xanga.com/rss.aspx?user=username

So how did I discover this? I finally simply Googled on "Xanga rss" :)