RSS Feed & Social Media

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RSS Feed & Social Media

Finally getting the RSS feed working

It took a bit of digging and wrestling to get there, but a couple of nights ago I also managed to get an RSS feed working for the blog posts on the site. Honestly, I spent more time fiddling with dates in javascript than I should have.

I had to make some minor modifications this morning to accommodate where the location should be, but it should be live now.

The location is: http://pixls.us/blog/feed.xml.

Both the blog index pages and post pages contain a element that point to it, so most readers should find the feed if you point it at a page. I’ll test it later, but the most important thing is the location is correct regardless of whatever hacking I do to the feed itself later.

I’ve tested the feed quickly with feedly and it appears to be working ok. If anyone else is using other feed readers and sees a problem, please let me know!

I intend to have a separate feed available for the articles and main site content when I get those ready to go (most likely at http://pixls.us/articles/feed.xml).

Social Media

I’ve also started (perhaps prematurely?) getting some social media accounts registered. If for nothing else than to keep someone else from parking the accounts.

Google+

At the moment, I’ve got a Google+ page setup for the site. I’ll try to keep updates flowing to that page as well (so if you happen to use g+, follow it!). If you already follow me on g+ then you’ll know I’m fairly active there.

Now if I could just get google to allow my vanity URL to only read +pixlus I’d be a happy camper!

Twitter

Back when I first registered this domain name, I apparently had the foresight to register a Twitter handle as well. So if you want to follow the conversation there, you can find me @pixlsus. I even found a first tweet back from Dec 2011!

Flickr

I’ve also created a Flickr group for users on Flickr to share photos or congregate. You can find the group here.

Really this is just a pre-emptive action to have these channels available as soon as we get going.

Moving Along

I feel like I’m gaining a little traction here. There’s a few more things I need to tidy up and make some design decisions on, but at least I have a clear vision going forward. I’ve already got an article ported over from Getting Around in GIMP on my blog to use as a test case for formatting.

As soon as I like how it’s looking, I’ll work on porting over some other articles as well. If it goes well, I may just go ahead and update/re-write some more things as well to test with. As soon as I have things in a relatively stable state I’ll also get some new material out as well!


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://pixls.us/blog/2014/09/rss-feed-social-media/

Using thunderbird I get no RSS messages at all from this site… The feed validates OK just no feed.

Is it a setting in Thunderbird maybe? I just checked in thunderbird as well, and it appears to work correctly.

You can try using PIXLS.US Blog instead, in case it’s an http/https issue.

You can also test by grabbing the main feed for everything on the site at: PIXLS.US
That’s the same one that powers the integration with the forum, and should work fine (it may be more useful to you as it will list any type of article that gets published, not just the blog).

The main feed PIXLS.US fails to validate -

Sorry

This feed does not validate.

line 546, column 12: Invalid character in a URI: Mairi Wavelet Scales Horiz Normal.jpg (2 occurrences) [help]

                </description>
                ^

The blog feed does nothing with http or https, although both validate OK. Both do contain warnings about interoperability with the widest range of feed readers that could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.

line 81, column 0: Non-html tag: figcaption (99 occurrences) [help]

    <figcaption>

line 214, column 0: description should not contain data-swap-src attribute (31 occurrences) [help]

    <img src="https://pixls.us/articles/skin-retouching-with-wavelet-decompose/M ...

line 278, column 0: description should not contain data-fig-swap attribute (15 occurrences) [help]

    <span class="toggle-swap" data-fig-swap="Mairi-Base.jpg">Original</span>

line 546, column 12: description should not contain relative URL references: Mairi-Base.jpg (91 occurrences) [help]

                </description>
                ^

line 712, column 0: style attribute contains potentially dangerous content: 1rem [help]

    <figure style="border: solid 2px #999; padding: 1rem;">

line 1326, column 0: description should not contain iframe tag (3 occurrences) [help]

    <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ ...

line 3075, column 0: description should not contain script tag [help]

    <p><script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">

though I should still get ther feed despite the warnings.

I knew about the odd “Invalid character in a URI” error, which I don’t understand - the data is wrapped in a CDATA element, and the URI includes spaces, but that shouldn’t matter to the validator (CDATA shouldn’t be parsed by the validator).

The feeds appear to work fine in Thunderbird and Feedly for me.

I went in and manually modified the one offending line (that shouldn’t have offended), and it cleared up the validation problems:

http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A//pixls.us/feed.xml

Does the feed still not show up for you?

I retried PIXLS.US and now it works. I had noticed I was not getting email notifications either, the only thing I could think of was something wrong in my message filters so I have disabled them for now and will add them back once I wake up properly.

Oh good! Glad that it’s starting to work.
That’s a good question about the email messages. I’ll try testing it by sending you some messages today to see if they’re delivering properly, or getting caught somewhere.

Thank you very much for being patient and helping iron some of these things out! :smile:

No problem, now I am retired there is nothing but doing what give me pleasure!

On the email notifications I see I had none since the 18th, there have been a few replies to topics and a name mention that I did not get, I checked trash and junk to be sure. The filter was just moving stuff from my inbox to my photography box, but I have that turned off as well just be be sure.

neat! without this post, I wouldn’t have noticed that there was a global feed that covers the blog and the articles section… shouldn’t /feed.xml be linked from somewhere in the website?

I just noticed that the footer in the main site still has the link to Google+, that has died meanwhile. And since we’re talking about social networks, how about creating a Mastodon account?

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