RSS Feed Specifications and Troubleshooting Guide

This detailed post will provide best practices related to troubleshooting RSS feeds. Following these steps will ensure that Triberr will properly crawl your rss feed and import your latest blogs.

Section 1: What is an RSS Feed?

RSS (Real Simple Syndication) is a way by which Triberr imports your new posts and presents them to your tribemates for sharing. So, it’s very important that your RSS is configured correctly.

You can find your RSS feed’s address in few different ways.

1.1 Look for the RSS Icon

If you have a RSS, it will usually be visible somewhere on your blog as an RSS icon. It looks like this:

Click on it and copy/paste the URL from the address bar into Triberr’s Settings.

1.2 WordPress

Discovering the URL for your RSS feed on WordPress is usually pretty easy.

It’s either:

http://your_domain_name.com/feed

OR

http://your_domain_name.com/rss

1.3 BlogPost

On BlogPost.com (aka Blogger), the naming convention is as follows:

http://your_domain_name.blogpost.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

1.4 Tumblr

Your RSS feed URL with Tumblr is actually pretty easy. Just add /rss at the end of your domain name.

For example: http://dogandogs.tumblr.com/rss

Related Post: Where do I configure my RSS feed?

1.5 Podcasts

Your podcast may be embedded in your blog, in which case use your blog’s RSS url.

If you’re using LibSyn to host your podcast, the RSS URL usually takes the form of http://podcast_name.libsyn.com/rss where “podcast_name” is the name of your podcast.

1.6 YouTube RSS

Triberr is able to import your YouTube videos directly using your channel’s RSS URL, which usually takes the form of:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/insert_channel_name_here/uploads where “insert_channel_name_here” is the name of your channel.

1.7 RSS Explained

Check out this very informative video about RSS feeds.

Section 2: How Do I Access My Feeds?

Your feeds are located under Account Settings > My Blogs

• You can have up to 1 feeds if you have a free accounts.

• You can have up to 4 feeds with Prime Lite account.

• You can have up to 14 feeds with Prime membership.

To add a new RSS feed to Triberr, follow these steps:

1. Go to your Content Details page following the above steps (Account -> Settings -> My Blogs)
2. Click on the Add RSS button.
3. Enter your feed detail on the overlay window that pops up

Once assigned, feeds are locked for 30 days to prevent abuse.

Section 3: What to Do if Your Posts Are Not Importing Into Triberr

3.1 Manually Check Feed

Occasionally posts don’t import to Triberr for several hours, and some of us are impatient and want them to be there immediately.

If you use the Triberr plugin for self-hosted WordPress sites, this won’t be a problem. But if not you might find an occasion where you want to manually import your posts.

Start by going to your Triberr Settings which are up in the right corner of the page.

Then navigate to My Blogs, visually locate the blog you want to pull your latest posts from, and then click refresh icon next to blog title. This will show you a list of posts that have either been imported or will be added to your triberr account.

3.2 Check If Your Feed Is Valid

Sometimes if your posts are not importing correctly, it is possible that your rss feed is invalid. To see if your feed is valid, copy your rss feed into these free online validators:

• Feed Validator – (http://www.feedvalidator.org/)
  
• W3C Markup Validation Service – (https://validator.w3.org/)
• RSSBoard – (http://www.rssboard.org/rss-validator/)

If your feed is invalid, these feed validators will provide where and what is causing the error(s) so you can fix it quickly or provide to your web developer for resolution. 

3.3 Re-importing Your Posts After Deleting It

We do not allow ANY posts to be re-imported to your Triberr account for any reason whatsoever.

The reason for this is that by re-importing your posts, all of your tribemates will be re-sharing your old posts to their respective followers, and this will make your tribemates, as well as yourself, look  bad. We want to keep Triberr user feeds fresh, and make sure that every time someone sees a post on Triberr, they know it’s not recycled content.

In the future, please do not delete posts once they have already been imported into Triberr. Our policy is to ban anyone that does this or is flagged by members for duplicating a post into a tribe’s feed. We make no exceptions on this matter as it is violating every tribemate’s social influence.

As per our internal policy, we cannot and will NOT re-import or manually re-add a post inside Triberr to protect the integrity of all users and their social account.

3.4 Import Post Limitation

In triberr there are 3 membership levels, each have a limitation on how many posts a user can import into triberr weekly.

Learn more about membership limitations here (https://help.triberr.com/membership-levels-triberr/)

3.4.1 “Failed” Posts

If you have imported more posts than your membership level allows, those additional posts will be marked as “failed”

If you are a free or Prime Lite member, you can upgrade your membership level then click the “retry” button next to your post.

If you are already a Prime member, or you are unable to upgrade your membership, you’ll need to wait a day until you fall under the threshold.

The threshold works on a rolling 7 days. That means when the system tries to schedule your post for sharing it takes the current time, then looks back over the last 7 days to see how many posts you have imported and shared. If the number of posts imported exceeds the threshold for your membership level the post fails to schedule.

3.5 Why Aren’t My Posts Showing Up In My Tribemates Stream?

Note: You must be a MEMBER of a tribe for your posts to import into tribal streams. 

Follow these steps if your posts are not showing in your tribal streams.

1. First check to see if your posts are importing into triberr. Navigate to your profile and confirm your posts are in your stream, if they are not refer back to section 3.1-3.4.
2. Navigate to Account Settings > My Blogs > Import Settings and make sure your blog is connected to the specified tribe. A window will appear listing all your tribes with a drop down under each tribe which lists your blogs. Remember, you can only assign a blog to a specific tribe every 30 days.

3.6 Why Are Images Not Importing With My Post

We routinely see support tickets where members do have an image in their post but the image does not appear when imported into Triberr. In most cases the image does not appear in your post because the image is not included in your rss feed. To ensure this is the case navigate to your RSS feed url in a browser.

Search for the characters  “img src=” or “img” (do not include quotations in the search) . If you do not find the text listed in your rss feed for each post an image is not included in your feed. In some cases the image tag may be formatted differently so if you’re confident an image is included in your rss feed just search for the actual image url

For WordPress users you can add a featured image to your rss feed using different methods.

1. Update Code in WordPress Editor to add a featured image to your rss feed
2. Use a Plugin to add a featured image to your RSS Feed

Method 1:

Step 1
First, Add code to functions.php file by navigating to Appearance -> Editor -> Then Select Theme Functions ‘functions.php’

Step 2

Then put the following code at the bottom of your functions.php file (If you don’t know what you are doing, make sure to backup your functions.php file before editing it)

function featuredtoRSS($content) {
global $post;
if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ){
$content = '<div>' . get_the_post_thumbnail( $post->ID, 'medium', array( 'style' => 'margin-bottom: 15px;' ) ) . '</div>' . $content;
}
return $content;
}
 
add_filter('the_excerpt_rss', 'featuredtoRSS');
add_filter('the_content_feed', 'featuredtoRSS');

Once you’ve saved this update your feed should now include a featured image for each post. Please note you will still need to include a featured image in the featured image section of WordPress when publishing the post.

Credit to Alex Joy for this simple update

Plugin Method

You can also use a free WordPress plugin called – Featured Images in RSS & Mailchimp Email

The plugin will allow you to easily:

• Add images to your RSS feed.
• Featured image size: Select from thumbnail, medium, large, any theme-specific sizes, and full size.
• Image Position: Select Image left above text, Image left text wrap, Image right text wrap, and Image centered above text.
• Padding: Instantly set the spacing between the image and the body text.

3.7 Importing Posts Older Than 2 Weeks.

To keep content on triberr fresh and relevant, we will only import posts that were published within the past 2 weeks.

By manually checking your feed (Section 3.1), you will be able to identify your posts that were published more than 2 weeks ago.

Section 4: Contacting Triberr Support

4.1 Contact Support

If all else fails, contact Triberr Support Team at support@triberr.com and one of our representatives will assist. Though, please note that we cannot login to your website to fix issues or troubleshoot. We can only provide general guidance related to feeds, and your web developer will have to make all changes and perform troubleshooting.