Using an RSS feed is a great way to bring your blog into your app. However, sometimes feeds don’t behave as you’d expect. Here you’ll find some good troubleshooting information to help ensure your blog is pulled into your app smoothly!
Why isn’t my blog loading?
If no content is coming through on your Blog tab or RSS item, you’ll first want to verify that you have the correct RSS feed. Check out our article on Finding an RSS Feed to ensure you have the right link.
If you’ve walked through finding the correct RSS feed and you still have trouble, try running the feed link through an RSS feed validator (for example Podbase or CastFeedValidator) to make sure there are no issues. If this comes back clean, contact us for further troubleshooting.
Why doesn’t my whole post show?
You may find that your posts are getting truncated in the app. It may have a Read more link (like the screenshot below), or [...] which doesn’t link properly to the rest of your blog post.
Truncated blog post
If this happens to you, you’ll need to look in the settings area for your blog to ensure the entirety of your blog posts are being put into the RSS feed.
WordPress
If your blog is run through WordPress, all you need to do is head to the Reading option in the Settings menu. Once there, you’ll want to make sure that the “for each article in a feed, show” section is set to “full text.” Additionally, our RSS option in the app can pull in up to 50 items, so you can take this time to set “syndication feeds show the most recent” to 50 items.
Where are my images?
In order for your blog images to show up in the app, they will need to be part of your RSS feed. How this works depends on who provides your RSS feed.
WordPress
WordPress has an image option that works great for their websites and is often used: the Featured Image. However, this image does not actually get pulled through into the RSS feed option properly. Because of this behavior, featured images will not import into our system by default.
There are two ways you can ensure the images are pulled through to the feed. Make sure you add the image to the blog post itself and that the image is at least 500 pixels wide. Or check out this WordPress plugin for adding the featured image into your RSS feed.
Squarespace
Squarespace also treats images a bit differently. There are two main ways people add images to their Squarespace blog posts: the first is through Options > Thumbnail Image and the second is adding an image item directly to the blog. However, neither of these options will pull images through in an RSS feed.
The best way to ensure the image you add to your Squarespace blog comes through the RSS feed properly is by hosting the image externally. You’ll need to start by uploading the image online. Make sure the image is public, and grab the share link. To learn more about hosting your images for your Squarespace blog, check out this article.
Next, you’ll need to pull the image into your blog post. This will need to be done using either a Markdown or Code element added to the post.
For markdown, use the following:
. Example: For Code (or html), use the following: <img alt="Image Title" src="Image URL">. Example <img alt="Swiss Alps" src="http://interbay-community-church.s3.amazonaws.com/blog-images/lights.jpg">;
Why doesn’t my blog formatting look right in the app?
Blog posts can sometimes have weird formatting when they are pulled into a third party viewer using the RSS feed. This is because the feed is intended to have plain text only, with a few exceptions for items like links or images.
However, some blog systems will insert HTML tags for extra structure or styling. Since these tags are extra, most RSS feed readers are not set up to recognize them. Thus they are not interpreted by the system but are instead shown in the blog post itself.
To remove these HTML tags, you’ll need to make sure there’s no specific styling added to your blog post (anything outside of the normal bolding, italics, etc). Any styling for your blog should be done by your blogging system itself and only for the blog website. Additionally, some blog systems will give you some settings options for using HTML. If you have these options, make sure you have them set up properly.
Why doesn’t my RSS Feed import my podcast or video content?
RSS feeds can be used for many different types of content. However, the Blog/RSS system for Subsplash is specifically designed to bring text and image content into your app, so it will only work with a blog RSS feed. Our feed reader will not import a podcast or video RSS feed because podcast or video feeds have specific tags that the system does not recognize, and cannot parse at this time.