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RSS Feed Customization

By andersen.lucy, in Customize with code

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andersen.lucy Level 5

andersen.lucy

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Hello! I run the website for an online magazine called The Dial that publishes new issues every month. Each of these issues is created in a new blog collection. We did this because we wanted each issue to have a unique slug (/issue-X/article-name), a different color, its own landing page, for the pagination at the bottom of each article to be confined to a given issue, and in general to make targeting each issue with custom code easier.

Currently, we're trying to get our work onto news aggregators using each issue's RSS feeds and are encountering a  problem. Some (Apple News, Flipboard) have been successful, but others (SmartNews) are not working because the format/tags that they look for when scraping the RSS feeds don't match up with what Squarespace uses. So, for instance, SmartNews doesn't show any of our blog articles as having thumbnail images even though each article has a featured image. We get an error that "item.media:thumbnail is missing".

I know this is a bit of a niche issue, but I'm wondering if anyone has experience specifically with modifying the RSS feeds on Squarespace? Essentially, adding code that could tell external feed aggregators that, for instance, the featured blog post images on Squarespace are in fact the 'item.media: thumbnail' that they're looking for? 

Or, if anyone has any recommendations for developers with experience working with Squarespace RSS feeds that we could potentially hire to help out.

Thanks in advance.
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andersen.lucy
andersen.lucy

Thanks @creedon! Appreciate the additional thinking. Going to look around a little and see what might be doable. Our hope is that the news aggregator we're having issues with might be able to recommen

creedon Level 15

creedon

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I do not have a solution but I had a thought. If one was motivated time and money wise. It might be possible to rewrite an SS RSS feed via an external service.

This is the theory. Add custom tags in a code block with the needed data. With an external service, read in the RSS feed from the SS site. Transform it with XSLT into a finalized format. Other tools might be used as well. Then provide the transformed file via a URL.

Something like AWS Lambda might be useful.

Find my contributions useful? Please like, upvote, mark my answer as the best ( solution ), and see my profile. Thanks for your support! I am a Squarespace ( and other technological things ) consultant open for new projects.

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