Feed readers assume every site publishes RSS. Many big publishers don't, or stopped years ago. Paste nikkei.com into a typical reader and you get "no feed found" and nothing else, even though the site publishes hundreds of articles a day and lists them neatly on its section pages: Business, Startups, Legal, and so on. Those section pages are the way in. A reader that can watch a section page and pick the article links out of it follows the site just as well as a feed would. The steps below do this in the News screen of the osFoundry desktop app, with Nikkei's Startups section as the example.
Add the site
Open News, go to Media List, and click the + next to My Sources. Paste the site address into Website or feed URL. For Nikkei, paste www.nikkei.com with the www; without it, the site redirects its section addresses to the front page.
Under Check for new articles, the default is Every day. For a section you read closely, Every hour is the better choice. Then click Add.
The app now looks for a feed in three places, in this order. First a hidden link in the page itself (<link rel="alternate">), which is how most sites with RSS announce it. Then nine usual feed addresses such as /feed and /rss.xml. Then the sitemaps listed in the site's robots.txt. Nikkei has no feed in any of them, and its two sitemaps are broad indexes rather than lists of new articles, so the app stops offering feeds and offers the site's sections instead.
Pick the sections
The list comes from the publisher's own sitemap, not from guessing at the menu, so the sections are the ones Nikkei itself defines. For Nikkei that is 185 sections. The picker shows 60 at a time, and the filter box finds the rest.
Tick the sections you want and click Add 1 section (the count follows what you tick). Each section becomes its own source with its own schedule. A check is one request to that section page, nothing more: no crawling through the site, no following links.
The front page is listed too, as "everything on the site". It can't be combined with sections, because it already contains their articles and you would get every story twice.
Read it in News
Open the News tab and click the new source in the library. The Startups section came back with 20 articles, each with its time.
Getting 20 clean headlines out of a section page takes some filtering. The Startups page had 271 different links on it, most of them menus, tag pages, login and account links. The app keeps only links shaped like articles: a date in the address (/2026/11/06/…), a long ID (Nikkei's look like /article/DGXZQOUC026TI0S6A101C2000000/), or a slug of four words or more. If most of those share one first path segment, like /article/, stray matches outside it are dropped too. Headlines and times come from the section page. The short summary under each headline is read afterwards from the article page's own description tag.
All of this runs on your computer. The requests go from your machine to the publisher, there is no server in between, and the list is in the order the publisher put it, not ranked by anything.
Where this doesn't work
Two kinds of sites can't be followed this way. Some build their article lists in the browser with JavaScript, so the page the app downloads has no article links in it; the picker says so instead of adding an empty source. Others refuse automated requests outright, with a 403 or a robots.txt that only lets named search engines in. For those, the publisher's newsletter or app is the realistic route.
For everything else, the section route turns a site without RSS into a normal source. The News screen also pulls in news from a large set of ready-made sources, described on the osFoundry news firehose page, and the app is free from the osFoundry download page for macOS, Windows and Linux.
