FeedBat 🦇

A Chrome extension that discovers RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds on any webpage. Your trusty companion for finding feeds in the wild.

Features

• 🦇 Automatically detects RSS, Atom, and JSON feeds on any webpage
• 🔔 Badge notification when feeds are found
• ⚙️ Configurable settings
• 📋 One-click copy feed URL to clipboard
• 🔗 Open feeds directly in new tab
• 🔍 Probe common feed paths on demand

Installation

From Source

1. Clone this repository:

   git clone https://github.com/schmug/FeedBat.git
   cd FeedBat

2. Generate icons (first time only):

   • Open chrome-extension/icons/generate-icons.html in your browser
   • Click "Download All Icons"
   • Save the PNG files to the chrome-extension/icons/ folder

3. Load in Chrome:

   • Go to chrome://extensions/
   • Enable "Developer mode"
   • Click "Load unpacked"
   • Select the chrome-extension folder

4. Pin the extension for easy access

Usage

1. Navigate to any website
2. Look for the purple badge showing feed count
3. Click the icon to see detected feeds
4. Copy or open feeds with one click

Settings

Click ⚙️ in the popup to configure:

Setting	Description
Auto-detect feeds	Scan pages automatically on load
Show potential feeds	Display links that might be feeds
Show badge count	Display feed count on icon
Auto-probe common paths	Check /feed, /rss.xml, etc. automatically

How It Works

FeedBat detects feeds using multiple methods:

1. Link Tags - Parses <link rel="alternate"> tags with feed MIME types
2. Direct Detection - Checks if the current page is itself a feed
3. URL Patterns - Identifies links containing feed-related keywords (rss, atom, feed, etc.)
4. Common Paths - Probes standard locations like /feed, /rss.xml, /atom.xml
5. YouTube Channels - Automatically extracts RSS feeds from YouTube videos, shorts, and channel pages

YouTube RSS Detection

YouTube doesn't advertise RSS feeds, but every channel has one. FeedBat automatically detects YouTube pages and extracts the channel's RSS feed URL:

• Video pages (/watch?v=...) - Extracts the channel ID from the video owner
• Shorts (/shorts/...) - Extracts from the shorts player overlay
• Channel pages (/@username, /channel/..., /c/...) - Extracts from the channel header

Since YouTube is a Single Page Application (SPA), FeedBat waits for YouTube's dynamic content to load before detecting feeds. It also listens for navigation events to update the feed when you browse between videos.

Credits

The feed detection logic in this extension is adapted from feedsearch-crawler, an excellent Python library for RSS/Atom/JSON feed discovery by DBeath.

Original Library:

• feedsearch-crawler on GitHub
• feedsearch-crawler on PyPI

License

MIT License - see LICENSE