RSS Feed Failed

  • Last Friday, the RSS feed on my site, The Virtual Stamp Club, failed. Instead of the list of the most-recent posts, the box starts “Error: Feed failed! Causes may be…” After several days of asking my hosting company for help, and not getting any, we took out the RSS feed and put something else in. The old home page can be found at virtualstampclub.com/last-friday.htm

    The first tech at HostGator downgraded WP back to 6.1.1, saying there were “known problems” with 6.2. I went back to 6.2 this evening.

    I read an earlier posting here, https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/site-suddenly-has-no-rss-feed/ and tried disabling the plug-ins: First the most recently updated; then each of them one-by-one; and finally EVERY plug-in. We didn’t change the HTML for the RSS feed last Friday. TS Poll was the most recently updated plug-in (6 days ago) but, again, disabling it didn’t make a difference. I’ve cleared the cache (that is, holding down the shift button while the page reloads) and also tried Chrome. (I usually use Firefox.) Chrome just has nothing after the headline.

    I just saw that I have a “critical issue:” Background updates are not working as expected. The two items with X are “The WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE constant is defined as false” and “WordPress security and maintenance releases are blocked by define( 'WP_AUTO_UPDATE_CORE', false );.” I have no idea how to correct this or if this is the reason for the RSS problem. I’m not that technical a person.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Last Friday, the RSS feed on my site, The Virtual Stamp Club, failed.

    1) What feed URL are you using?

    2) What SPECIFIC error are you seeing when you say the RSS feed “failed”?

    A quick look at your site shows your WordPress installation is not installed at the root of the domain, but in a subdirectory at virtualstampclub.com/lloydblog.

    But your site is not using pretty permalinks: it’s using the default “plain” permalink. So instead of the common /feed for the feed URL, yours will be at /?feed=rss2

    Thus your full, correct feed URL should be:

    https://virtualstampclub.com/lloydblog/?feed=rss2

    And this feed URL works for me.

    In fact, here’s a test page where I’ve embedded your RSS feed:

    https://m-invasion-huco.instawp.xyz/testing-rss/

    The above test page will be alive for only a couple of hours, so I’m adding a screenshot below in case the test page is gone by the time you read this:

    So it seems your site’s RSS feed works. Your problem might be down to implementation details: what you’re doing with the feed and even if you’re using the correct feed address, to begin with.

    Thread Starter LloydStamps

    (@lloydstamps)

    Thanks. I’ll work on this and let you know.

    Thread Starter LloydStamps

    (@lloydstamps)

    I can’t get your code to work. I only know basic HTML. The guy who has been doing much of my HTML work for years isn’t answering.

    Here’s what was there and was working until last Friday:

    Here’s a picture (from 2 years ago) of what it looks like when it works (although without the background):

    One final note: Yes, the site is dorky. Some stamp collectors are very good with the latest technology but others are not so good, and I wanted the site to be readable by as many as possible.

    Thanks.

    While I see some errors in the current code on the site (wrong URLs) the real reason it’s not working (and why it stopped working, to begin with) has nothing to do with your website or your RSS feed.

    Rather, Feed2JS.org, the external website you’re using to fetch and display your WordPress RSS feed into your static HTML page is completely broken: it simply doesn’t work.

    Here’s the page used to generate the JavaScript code: https://feed2js.org/build.php

    Put ANY RSS feed into it (eg https://www.ads-software.com/news/feed), it’ll tell you it’s invalid.

    Meanwhile, the link it provides to check if your RSS feed is valid returns a 404-Not-Found error. Go figure!

    Your solution is to look for an alternative RSS to HTML/JavaScript service. Unfortunately, this seems to be a dying breed, and most of the services that were very popular a just few years ago are completely off the Intertubes now.

    These two still work, and don’t require account signup:

    https://www.feedroll.com/rssviewer/

    https://rss.bloople.net/

    There are other services that are more customizable (like this and this), but they all require you to create an account with them, and some are not even free).

    Good luck!

    Thread Starter LloydStamps

    (@lloydstamps)

    Thank you. I’ve asked my web editor (“developer” is too strong a word) to take a look at it, or I will myself.

    Thread Starter LloydStamps

    (@lloydstamps)

    We are up and running, using another RSS site, although this one is not free. I couldn’t get Feedroll to work (nothing happened when I asked it to generate the Java script, except it went to its home page. Boople worked, but we didn’t like the way it looked. We’re still looking.

    At least now we know it wasn’t us or something at HG. Thanks!

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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