This plugin is full or bugs – which lightweight alternative for follow widget?

Thank you for your question! If you want to stay light, don’t use any plugin. Just embed this form on your site https://follow.it/follow-form/openmtbmap-org-mountainbike-and-hiking-maps-based-on-openstreetmap.

Thanks found this some minutes ago. You really should include this to the WordPress instructions. That other plugin is a pure mess. Oh I guess this plugin here is actually not needed anymore once converted from Feedburner as follow.it will get the feed via RSS? Or do I need to keep this plugin active/installed?

Right, follow.it will get the stories directly from your RSS feed, so it will work fine (without any plugins). The question is if you also want to see your RSS reader stats in your follow.it dashboard. For that, you would need to apply a redirect from your original RSS feed (https://openmtbmap.org/feed) to the one on follow.it (https://follow.it/openmtbmap-org-mountainbike-and-hiking-maps-based-on-openstreetmap – that’s also an RSS feed). You can either use this plugin for the redirect, or apply a redirect in other ways (see https://solutionbay.com/solutions/how-to-apply-a-redirect-for-a-website-or-rss-feed-301-or-302).

thanks for the great support. I guess with nginx this then means the following line around the top of the server block (but after server_name directive):

location = /feed {
	rewrite ^/feed$ https://follow.it/openmtbmap-org-mountainbike-and-hiking-maps-based-on-openstreetmap permanent; }

• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by extremecarver.
• This reply was modified 1 year, 5 months ago by extremecarver.

To be honest not sure (I’m not a developer), however you can just try it out and see if the redirection works.

Actually the rewrite didn’t work – waht is the useraged from follow.it? I guess it cannot access it because it’s redirected too.

With feedburner the nginx redirect was as follows:

if ($http_user_agent !~ FeedBurner) { rewrite ^/feed/ https://feeds.feedburner.com/FEEDNAME last;
 }

Again, I’m not technical, however how is anything on the follow.it side relevant? You only need to apply a redirect from your original feed to follow.it, or?

I had the redirect active as above but the feed would not be published. So I guess feedburner could not access it. Now I reactivated the plugin so the feed will get published. I guess I would need to know the name of the follow.it user agent to exclude it from being redirected. If that one is redirected on server level – then follow.it will be redirected to it’s own site when trying to access it.

When I reactviated the pluign and applied the redirect – the feed appeared in the messages section on follow.it quite soon. So I just know that the redirect that I used before didn’t work ( I had posted the news post already 30 hours before ). So I’m not sure what was going wrong or not.

Ok, it’s still fuzzy to me. What does “the feed appeared in the messages section on follow.it quite soon” mean exactly?

In any case, let’s get back to square 1: What exactly are you trying to achieve? Follow.it also works fine without any redirects. The only point of redirects would be that you can see the statistics of your old RSS users (who have your original RSS feed in their feed readers) in the follow.it dashboard. Maybe you could live without it? Or is that important to you?

yeah I guess I don’t need the rss statistics anyhow. So I will try without any redirect. What I mean is that I wrote a new post on my website – so it should have appeared on follow.it as message to be published – but it didn’t get published. I think that is because my redirect made it impossible for follow.it to access the rss. With the example of the feedburner nginx redirect it is clear that feedburner was excepted – so the feed would be accessible for feedburner without being redirected while anyone else is redirected.

Ok then let’s not have any redirects for now. Please observe if stories get picked up fine. If not, please reach out to us again, maybe by email is easier: help (at) follow (dot) it