Hi bloggers!
We’d like to learn about your experience working with the RSS feature on the Wix Blog so we can look into improving it. Please take a moment and share your thoughts on this feature to help us best address your needs.
Please share your feedback in the comments:
How do you use or plan to use the RSS feature?
Which, if any, tools do you use to import content (e.g. Facebook instant articles)?
What, if any, limitations do you experience?
How can the Blog RSS feature be improved to be more effective for you?
Thank you and looking forward to hearing your feedback!
@Simona G. thank you for so quickly responding and helping set my expectations.
I would just reply that the work to enhance RSS features mainly serves a relatively small population of Wix sites with users who regularly employ RSS readers that can parse out the different categories from the aggregate feed. The universe of users who understand and use email subscriptions is far larger. Adding category-specific RSS feeds would serve that larger population. And it seems like a relatively simple enhancement to implement.
Thanks again for responding and for all the marvelous support you give to your Wix developers.
Late to comment--but an old request: Please enable offering RSS feed for individual category, not just the single RSS feed for all categories. This would enable easily offering email newsletters for individual categories. Thanks.
I just signed up with Feedly, an RSS reader. Still trying to figure this out.
What is an RSS reader? Do I have to pay for an ap to use it?
Here is what I get when I add /blog-feed.xml to my site domain.
When I click on my RSS button, I get the following message: "This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below."
I am trying to link my blog to my Amazon author page and would also like to link it to social media. Can you help me please?
How do I find the link to my rss feed?
@Simona G. @Julius Seskevicius btw the aggregator i am using is the WP (wordpress) Aggregator. Thank you.
Hi @Robert, @Dev! We appreciate your feedback. Definitely, Facebook instant articles, Google News are the most popular aggregators. Compatibility for them with HTML post content will be our priority when updating RSS.
Apple News does not require post content and should be compatible even now. it takes portion of the beginning of each item’s description element —up to 200 characters, which is used as the article excerpt in channel and topic views.
Currently rss feed only supports one image in article. Old wix blog rss feed supported and displayed as much as images in article. So it is must needed. Also as Robert said, I too have news website and want to integrate with fb instant articles, apple news and google news. If blog feed provides integration with all news aggregator then Wix will be best place for users who want to create news website. Squarespace has direct integration for apple news.
Hello, Thanks for taking the time to improve the RSS feature. Currently the RSS isn't sustainable for larger blogs - we have 300,000 monthly visitors to our site and want to start exploring how we can build our own mobile app and even integrate Apple News, Google News and Facebook Instant Articles. Because of the current state of the Wix Blog RSS - none of these are possible. Now, I know that you will want to keep people coming to Wix sites as much as possible but you can't really place that restriction on us.
For Facebook instant articles, things have to be set up correctly. Here are just some of the things we need to be pulled through to FB instant articles.
Author
Published Date & Time
Rich Text with paragraphs breaks (right now everything is just plain content).
Images tags to be inserted in the RSS in between the text (where we place the images).
Support for gallery images on Instant Articles.
The 'Header Image' of the instant article needs to be pulled from the first image of the post, OR the main featured image (if added on Wix Blog).
Quotations need to be formatted
Basically the full content of the post needs to be displayed in an HTML form.
Images need to pull through the caption.
As you can see from the image, it uses one of the title tags as a subtitle (I think H2).
Here is an example of RSS which works well in FB Instant Articles.
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"> <channel> <title>News Publisher</title> <link>http://www.example.com/</link> <description> Read our awesome news, every day. </description> <language>en-us</language> <lastBuildDate>2014-12-11T04:44:16Z</lastBuildDate> <item> <title>This is an Instant Article</title> <link>http://example.com/article.html</link> <guid>2fd4e1c67a2d28fced849ee1bb76e7391b93eb12</guid> <pubDate>2014-12-11T04:44:16Z</pubDate> <author>Mr. Author</author> <description>This is my first Instant Article. How awesome is this?</description> <content:encoded> <![CDATA[ <!doctype html> <html lang="en" prefix="op: http://media.facebook.com/op#"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/article.html"> <meta property="op:markup_version" content="v1.0"> </head> <body> <article> <header> <!— Article header goes here --> </header> <!— Article body goes here --> <footer> <!— Article footer goes here --> </footer> </article> </body> </html> ]]> </content:encoded> </item> <!— Another Article (Each Article must be represented as an <item>) --> <item> <title>This is another Instant Article</title> <link>http://example.com/another_article.html</link> <pubDate>2017-02-14T05:20:00Z</pubDate> <content:encoded> <![CDATA[ <!doctype html> <html lang="en" prefix="op: http://media.facebook.com/op#"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/another_article.html"> <meta property="op:markup_version" content="v1.0"> </head> <body> <article> <header> <!— Article header goes here --> </header> <!— Article body goes here --> <footer> <!— Article footer goes here --> </footer> </article> </body> </html> ]]> </content:encoded> </item> </channel> </rss>
However, maybe there could be a better solution built for Instant Articles? For example, building it separately to work with API just how Wordpress does it. This would be more robust and would mean any changes to the article would be pushed to Facebook instantly and not later or manually.
See here >> https://wordpress.org/plugins/fb-instant-articles/
Wix Blog should also count Instant Article views as a view on the post - this can be integrated and maybe also add 'Instant articles' to the insights section.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/instant-articles/analytics/ I feel the above format I am talking about should apply to all the major news reader platforms. Let's do this!....
We need the RSS in general to have the full HTML contents displayed - gallery, embedded content, everything. Google News and Apple News will not approve us because of the current state of the RSS and the fact It's missing so much features and formatting.
Hi @Simona G. , the biggest gripe for me would be that the <description> element is only displaying plain text instead of including the HTML tags in it as well. This makes it difficult for site aggregators to display blog content properly.