Learn how to optimize your existing blog's RSS feed to avoid common problems when pulling blog content into your Hub.
Before You Begin
- To complete most of the steps described in this article, you'll need the necessary access to change settings in your blogging platform.
- Before making any changes to your blog's RSS feed settings, make sure to check whether these changes will impact any other software tools or activities that depend on the RSS feed.
- These optimizations won't work retroactively on existing Blog Streams in your Hub. If you previously imported a blog via RSS and it's experiencing the issues that the optimization steps address, you will need to delete that Blog Stream and re-import it afterwards.
- This article outlines general optimization steps that you should be able to apply to any blog platform. Please refer to your blogging platform's documentation for specific instructions on how to configure its RSS feed. For example, here are the relevant help articles for WordPress and HubSpot.
Optimization Guidelines
Regardless of the specific blogging platform that you use, you should make sure you have configured your RSS feed in the following ways:
Increase the Number of Posts
Why do this? For most RSS feeds, the number of posts included in the feed is fairly low: usually the latest 10 to 25. If you don't change this number, that number is the maximum that will be pulled into your Blog Stream in Uberflip, even if you have many more posts.
What to do: Since you generally want to pull all existing posts in the blog into your Hub, you want to make this number as high as possible — at least the same as the total number of posts in the blog. Once the import has been completed, you can reduce it back to whatever number you prefer. If you are unable to raise the number of posts in the RSS feed high enough due to limitations on your blogging platform, please contact us for help.
Keep in mind that, on an initial import, the maximum number of posts that you can pull in to Uberflip is 200. If the blog you want to import via RSS has more than 200 posts, please contact us, as we can lift this limit to import all of the posts. In this case, you must still set the number of posts in your blog's RSS feed as high as possible, as we will still be limited by this number after lifting the 200 post cap.
Include Full Posts
Why do this? RSS feeds will often be set up by default to only include excerpts, descriptions, or summaries. If you don't change this setting, you won't be able to pull the full blog posts, including images, into your Hub.
What to do: Set up your RSS feed so that the full content of the article is included within the HTML <content:encoded> tag that is present in the RSS version of your article.
Ensure Image Height and Width are Specified
Why do this? Uberflip Blog Streams acquire a blog post's images from the HTML <img> tags present in the RSS version of the post. In order for this to work, the tag must specify the width and height of each image, otherwise the images will not be pulled in with the post.
What to do: Make sure that the <img> tags in your RSS feed are configured to look something like this:
<img src=”IMAGE URL” alt=”IMAGE DESCRIPTION” height=”650″ width=”200″>
If you use "featured images" for your posts (these could be used on the summary page of all of your articles as a thumbnail, or above the article), you should ensure that these images are also included in the RSS feed.
In addition, you can also see this article to learn more about ensuring your images are properly formatted in your RSS feed.