Troubleshoot an RSS feed
If you are having some difficulty with your RSS or Google Alerts feed in Sendible, here are some steps you can try to get them working.
Important If you are unable to add an RSS feed successfully and the error displays as "no results", try adding the feed to Feedly (you can set up a free account with them). This will confirm the validity of the RSS feed, and Feedly will recognise that there is at least 1 follower of the RSS feed. This will allow it to be added successfully in Sendible and Feedly will poll the RSS feed for updates. Step-by-step instructions can be found here.
Quick Facts
- RSS Feeds are an easy way to keep up with the latest posts from your favourite websites.
- Most websites, but not all, have an RSS feed available, and it can often be found by adding
/feedto the end of its URL, e.g., http://sendible.com/insights/feed.
Validate the feed
As a first step, please ensure the RSS feed is valid. You can check for any issues by pasting the link for the RSS feed into the following site:
https://validator.w3.org/feed/
Your feed will need to be valid in order for it to work with Sendible.
If you have control of the RSS feed
If you've set up or have control of the RSS feed and experience any issues with the RSS feed and/or related posts being published from that RSS feed, such as:
- Incorrect image, text, or link being picked up
- Posts not being picked up from the RSS feed
then we highly recommend that you check out this article about how you can optimise the RSS feed.
10 ways to optimize your feed for Feedly.
If you don't have control of the RSS feed
If you found an RSS feed outside of Sendible or even as a recommendation when looking to add one to your Sendible account but you cannot add it successfully due to an error, or you find that:
- The incorrect image, text or link is picked up
- Posts are not being picked up from the RSS feed
then please take a few moments to open the feed through a free application called Feedburner, provided by Google:
https://feedburner.google.com/.
This will optimise the RSS feed and usually address any issues with the RSS feed being added or with posts from the RSS feed, including them being picked up successfully.
Once you've opened the RSS feed through Feedburner, you will have the option to create a new proxy Feedburner feed or refresh an existing one. You can then use the Feedburner URL that you can use in place of the original RSS feed URL when you add it to Sendible.
- For an existing feed in Feedburner, click on Configure Proxy to refresh, deactivate, or delete the feed.
- To create a new proxy for your feed, click on the blue Create proxy button in the lower right-hand corner, enter the feed URL, and click next.
- A new URL will be generated. Click on Create.
- Click on the Configure Proxy button associated with the newly created feed. Look for the Custom Feed Url and copy it to the clipboard.
- Then head over to Sendible's Content > RSS feeds and click the New Feed button in the top right-hand corner, choose Publications & Blogs and paste the new URL into the search box and click Search. You should then be able to add the feed to Sendible.
Please contact us and include the URL for the RSS feed should the problem persist after applying the above troubleshooting steps so that we can investigate further.
Using Google Alerts as RSS feeds
You can also set up a Google Alerts feed similar to how you set up an RSS feed. Google Alerts feeds are essentially ongoing searches that will populate based on new search results for the keywords you provided when setting up the Google Alerts feed.
Caution: As a Google Alerts feed is linked to a specific Google account (the one selected when setting this up), we don't recommend using the same Google Alerts feed across multiple users, e.g., pasting in an existing Google Alerts feed URL.
Instead, you should set this up separately for different users using different Google accounts as needed.
Please also bear in mind that, in these cases, updates are purely based on when new search results are picked up, and we only include results for Google Alerts feeds from the last 30 days to ensure the content is fresh and relevant. You may find that updates are limited if your keywords are very specific.