Jetpack’s Photon Breaks RSS

Hi, I’m not seeing that on my own sites – could you send a link to an affected URL and also let us know what’s happening when you use the RSS with our CDN on?

Thanks for helping!

The site is https://www.macobserver.com/ and our RSS is https://www.macobserver.com/feed/everything — But we have Photon disabled right now because it breaks our RSS.

Happy to do whatever we can to show you what’s going on. Just let me know what you need and we’ll take it from there.

Please enable the Site Accelerator feature on your site, then we can take a look at what’s going on. Can you also tell us how you know it’s breaking the feed? Are you unable to follow it in a particular feed reader, or does it give errors in a particular feed validator tool?

because it adds URL variables to image tags, which is disallowed in RSS.

My own Jetpack site, and thousands of other Jetpack and WordPress.com sites using our CDN, the RSS feeds work perfectly fine with those query strings on image URLs, so I don’t think that’s the problem here.

If your RSS feed isn’t working with those query strings, it’s more likely a problem with how the XML file for your feed is encoded.

I compared your RSS feed to my own Jetpack site’s at https://photos.kokkieh.blog/feed/, and the two are structured completely differently, so I’m going to guess you’re not using WordPress’s built-in RSS feeds for your site? Even compare the link you gave above to just https://www.macobserver.com/feed/, and you’ll see they look completely different.

Are you using a plugin to create an alternative RSS feed for your site?

In any event, is there a way to tell WordPress/Jetpack/Photon just to serve images directly in RSS?

If you’re using the built-in feed generated by WordPress, you can try asking in the advanced forums if there’s a way to modify WordPress itself to force the feed to ignore Photon links, but there’s no way I know of within Jetpack itself to do this, as Jetpack is not involved with the process that generates your site’s feed.

You can find the advanced forum at https://www.ads-software.com/support/forum/wp-advanced/

Thanks for your help!

I re-enabled site accelerator and I think you might have gotten us down the right path. Because… the images in /feed/ also have the parameters after them:

src="https://i1.wp.com/www.macobserver.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/workfeatured-spotify.png?resize=1200%2C630&ssl=1"

…but it validates, whereas our /feed/everything/ does NOT. And now I think I know why. We are *also* using the media:content for our images, and it seems the namespace for that does not support URLs with parameters. But… I can remove that and work around it. (we use custom fields and custom post types, hence the need for custom RSS creation).

However… we’re also podcasters, and this image is required atop every single podcast feed:

<image>
 <title>Mac Geek Gab</title>
 <link>https://www.macobserver.com/show/mac-geek-gab</link>
 <url>https://i0.wp.com/www.macobserver.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/macgeekgab_logo_sans_Finder-600px.png?fit=600%2C600&ssl=1</url>
 <width>144</width>
 <height>144</height>
 <description>Mac Geek Gab Podcast</description>
</image>

Unfortunately, having those parameters in the <url> breaks every podcast validator in existence, and we can’t have that. So… same problem, different place. Is there a way to invoke an image without having Site Accelerator affect it?

So… we’ve had to turn off Site Accelerator for now. If you’d like to setup a specific time to check it out, I’m happy to do that for you, but we can’t leave it like this, unfortunately.

I replied with a potential workaround to solve that issue on your site here:
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/can-i-bypass-jetpack-photon-for-a-specific-field/#post-12759539

Hopefully this helps!

Thanks, @jeherve. That’ll do it! ??

Thanks, Jeremy!