I have had problems with the RSS feed stacks in the past years. Now it seems to be worse than ever.
The Newsgrid stack was working perfectly until recently. Now it is only pulsing.
In order to solve the problem I just purchased Joe Workman’s Totem stack since it should be able to use RSS feed. It is not working for me.
The only stack that shows any RSS feed is Feedslider. But I do want something that pulls in my own blog entries with pictures unto the Home Page. There Feedslider is not really a replacement.
Here is a testpage with just the various RSS Feed stacks that I am testing: http://test.rathmair.eu/
Can it be that there is a major problem somewhere “out there” on the internet to cause such a breakdown of showing RSS items?
Can it be that I have something blocking on my own iMac? (I upgraded to Mojave before Christmas)…
I have no clue. But I want to search for a solution. Thanks for any ideas and suggestions you might have!
Yahoo had a very popular RSS Feed Api that was pretty easy to use. They shut this off this week.
I had a few RSS stacks that used this API. I have removed those stacks from sale for now until I can figure out how I am going to address the issue. Sorry for any inconvenience. Although, Feedslider is not my stack. I am pretty sure that this was the issue.
Thanks, Joe, for your reply. I hope a new solution can be worked out by you and others who serve us with these RSS stacks. Feedslider is the only stack that is still working, by the way.
@Franz I’d be happy to consider putting together a new RSS stack that was derived from FeedSlider. One which simply outputs a list of items, without the sliding animation effect. Of course I could consider other options, like letting it render items in the format of a responsive masonry grid or other embellishments. Please email me direct with your ideas, if this is something you want to see happen.
Will, thanks a lot for your offer. I reply to the forum because my wish relates to all the designers of the RSS stacks that I already own (Newsgrid, RSS Feed, Wall, Totem, RSS Ticker).
I wish the Newsgrid stack could be revived/reworked and function again. It did what I wanted it to do: Display on the Home page x number of blog entries (e.g. from http://pro-homine.at/blog2019/blog2018/Blog.php) with y number of words in length and importing also the picture that I have in my blog. To have only a listing of the blog entry titles (http://pro-homine.at/) is really just the emergency setting for the time being until another, fuller solution comes forward.
I would not mind to see a new stack come forward. But I am hesitant to buy another one since I purchased three or four in 2018 and none of them is doing what it is supposed to do. At least, I could not make it function properly…
+1 for a stack similar to Newsgrid: image + truncated text + link to read more.
These are some suggestions:
Showing Facebook, Twitter, RSS feed (summary or content)…
Option to design the look of the cards: background, links, border, shadow, number of columns…
Option to choose the number of cards…
Option to set the reload time…
Option to localize the language…
Option to set masonry grid layout or list…
Hi Will,
I ran into the same problem. What I would like to have is just a simple ticker derived from the RSS feed on my pages.
The existing tickers on the test site Franz created don’t seem to work at all.
As I am using it on a lot of pages I am prepared to pay part of the development costs, not just buy the stack.
Drop me a mail, it this is a possibility.
Regards
Lutz
I used to make use of Yahoo Pipes to concatenate RSS feeds, filter items on content and (nice feature) sorting them by date. This way you could impersonate a new RSS-feed (e.g. on Feedburner) and dynamically feed it fully controlled by the designer. I am not familiar with the stacks mentioned, but see it as a functionality to enhance existing stacks (if not in it already ;)) as I started to move to IFTTT to work with multiple feeds at the same time to find equivalent functinality… and without great succes up till now.
I appreciate your help. Thanks for the hint to upgrade the Wall stack to 1.4.5. I checked, the current version is 1.4.5
Then I placed the stack only unto the home page, using your own feed burner link that your stack supplies (https://feeds.feedburner.com/TechCrunch/social). There is an improvement: Now it shows 4 items in preview. But when I upload the page, nothing is shown online.
@miguelximenez The problem with Facebook and Twitter is that their APIs are very volatile. I know this, because I have worked with these APIs in the past. If you remember back several years, I used to have free stacks that could embed a Twitter feed and suchlike.
These free stacks got killed-off when Twitter and Facebook messed things up at their end. The InstaViewer stack I have has been severely crippled as a direct consequence of Instagram culling a large part of their developer API. And more recently the free MicroBlog stack barely works for anybody - again as a result of changes with Tumblr and their whole API going up s*** creek for the benefit of the EU GDPR police.
Twitter and Facebook APIs continue to be subjected to major changes or discontinuation with little warning or suitable alternatives. Additionally they expose website users to questionable data harvesting practices. Shady stuff I don’t really want to be any part of.
I would do my utmost to avoid ever building code or APIs borrowed from these types of services into my own stacks. It just would not be economically viable at $10 a shot. If I were to release an RSS / social media stack that required constant updates to keep it working with the likes of Twitter or Facebook, I would want to be charging about £500 a copy to make it anywhere close to worthwhile, for me to do. I’m serious.
A more generalised RSS feed stack would be feasible. Like with FeedSlider, I would prefer to use my own PHP backend to fetch the RSS file and parse it into the webpage as HTML. I would avoid the use of any third-party APIs or other stuff that would risk this thing breaking. I like to keep things simple and build stuff that will work reliably for a long time. In other words, I want complete control over the entire codebase.
If you simply want to fetch the last dozen or so news articles from your own blog and show them on a website homepage sidebar or grid, then that is definitely the sort-of thing I can say without doubt is technically feasible and I’d have interest in doing. But trying to pull stuff from social media sites would be of little itnerest to me, without the financial bribe.
As a temporary measure I’ve replaced my feed stacks with code from https://www.rssdog.com/
It’s a bit basic, but has got me out of a pickle with a list of over 100 podcast episodes.
using feed burner didn’t make a difference. The only stack that is working continues to be feedslicer. It takes my xml-File as well as feedburner. The Wall and others don’t like either of them…
Hmmmm - it’s most likely the format that it doesn’t like. It that case it might not be possible to use that particular feed with Wall on this project. Am always looking to improve and add updates so will see on improving the RSS parsing. Thanks
Hi Michael, too bad that this RSS theme is so complicated. Thanks for trying to find a solution to get it working for me and others using the Wall stack.
