AWeber Blog Broadcast

Sorry I didn’t see this til just now.

Done, and thanks for getting on this!

Hey Rob,

Hope you’re getting more donations. Any update for a timefream on the plugin?

Thanks

Good morning Rob! I just wanted to check back in as well. Looking forward to this update! ??

Hi Lindsay, John, thanks for the follow ups, I’ll need it. ??

After the conferences, I forgot but I was to be out of town for a week of travel, so got back in town yesterday, and of course completely swamped with WordPress projects right now, but I will strive to work on this later this week, and make some progress ASAP. I appreciate your patience and I want to get this done as soon as I can for you…

Thanks for all your effort Rob, looking forward to it. We’re about to put out a new newsletter and it will come in very handy.

I’ve done more research on how to best implement this for services like Aweber, but now I’m reading that using <content:encoded> will break Aweber, and that it looks for the featured image IMG SRC= in the <description> field, which is where it’s set currently.

From Aweber:

“I have tested the blog broadcast and I believe I know what may be causing the issue. While it may not always be the case, when you are pulling content, it is possible that if it is encoded, this will not be pulled correctly. Looking at your RSS feed, it appears that it is encoded. I would recommend looking into having your RSS feed post not encoded content <content:encoded> to <content> or posting a description through your RSS feed.”

but then read this:
https://blog.aweber.com/new-features/publish-full-posts-in-blog-broadcasts.htm

“As of now, the <img> tag for the thumbnail needs to be in the <description> or <content:encoded> tag in your RSS item in order to be included.”

So it should be working… have you tried changing {!rss_item_description} to {!rss_item_content} and see if that helps or makes it worse?

I’m digging into how best to implement adding options for handling the images better, while trying not to break it’s existing functionality for those that use it and it’s working fine for.

Thanks,
Rob

Thanks Rob I’ll give that a try. I’ll be gone most of the day today so I’ll try it tomorrow. I have notice it’s been pulling images sporadically since our initial conversation.

Thanks again,
John

I’ve been trying to use Aweber’s {!rss_item_description} while still including images in the blog broadcast for years. It just doesn’t work. For years I’ve searched for ways to do it, to no avail. I have found archives that were up to 4 years old where people are asking Aweber to update their code to include this functionality, they have yet to do anything about it.

Here’s the skinny on {!rss_item_description} vs. {!rss_item_content} in Aweber:

• {!rss_item_content}: using this variable will publish ENTIRE articles, including any images, in your blog broadcast. It basically looks just like your article.
• {!rss_item_description}: using this variable will publish article snippets, NOT including images, in your blog broadcast. It sends the article title, the description, and the contributing author, but NO thumbnail.

To me this is an epic fail for Aweber. I don’t understand why they don’t just get on making this work to INCLUDE a thumbnail image with the article snippets when using the {!rss_item_description} variable. It cannot be that difficult, and their customers have been asking for it for years and years.

I personally have asked them to implement it twice over the course of the last 2 years, but still nothing. Rob, if you can get this to work you’re a better man than the Aweber developers!

What I do is just build my blog broadcast manually using a custom template I made. I kind of like this better because it allows me to add promotional material to my weekly email blasts.

Sorry for the bad news, but just figured I’d share my experience.

Blessings.

Hi Rob,

I just read mattjabs comments here. When I first tried your plugin, no images came in for my Aweber broadcast email at all. Now however, some have the images displayed, others have a placeholder for the image and sometimes there will be one or two without any image.

I checked to see if there were any differences between the posts that had images and those that didn’t and could find no reason for this. It seems to me you’re making headway.

Thanks,
John

Hi Rob,

I’ve been testing Aweber and it seems that the images are now coming in fine using {!rss_item_description}. I’m now working on getting the description my rss send out to be the meta description I specify.

Thanks for your help,
John

still no luck on my end. Did you have to do anything special John?

Hi Lindsay,

I didn’t do anything specific, I’m just using Rob’s plugin and {!rss_item_description}. Send an email to me through support at moderndayqi dot com and I’ll send you a test message from my aweber blog broadcast so you can look at it.

Thanks,
John