Mailchimp images not resizing

Oh yeah, I have also regenerated all my images as they were uploaded prior to installing the plugin…

Jeff, can you refresh/resave your permalinks, please? The alternate feed link is returning a 404 for me. When I can review that, I can help troubleshoot.

Okay, done that and I can see the html feed code (i.e., no error message). However, now it appears that the image is not going through to Mailchimp at all.

I would appreciate any assistance you can provide.

Hey Jeff! Thanks so much for your patience. I think I know where things are going haywire, and hopefully have a fix in hand.

Are you able to upload replacement plugin files via FTP to your site? If so, please download the zip folder of the develop branch of the plugin from Github. You’ll want to unzip it, and replace all of the files in the includes directory on your server with the new ones.

If you can’t FTP, or aren’t comfortable with it, let me know and I can create a zip folder which won’t have the extra files in it that the Github repository does, and the swap can all happen inside of WordPress.

Once you have the new files up, you may need to purge any caches you have (either from a plugin or your host) to see the changes in the feed. If that doesn’t force the feed to update, you can uncheck the alternate feed setting, update your permalinks, check the alternate feed link and make sure it gives you a 404 error, and then recheck it and update permalinks (and then take a deep breath–sorry, but RSS feeds can be really persnickety to get updated).

Thanks again for your patience–please let me know if this resolves it, or if we need to keep digging.

Hi Robin,

Thanks for you responsiveness…pretty incredible really!

My preference is to do everything inside of WordPress if possible. I have solopreneurship and I’m trying to play IT guy at the moment so keeping it as simple as possible is a good thing.

For something that is espoused as being so “simple” this RSS feed thing is less than straightforward…troubleshooting devolves into unintelligible geek-speak pretty quickly (present company excepted, of course).

Thanks again for your help,
Jeff

Okay, to keep it within WordPress, let’s try it this way instead. You’ll want to deactivate and delete the plugin on your site, first of all (your settings won’t be lost, but that alternate feed link will break, which is fine). Then you can download this copy of the updated plugin, and upload it to your site–you’ll go to Add a new plugin, but pick upload instead of adding it from the repository.

This should address the issue, although the tricky part may be getting the feed to update, which is why I suggested deactivating the alternate feed, confirming that it’s down, and then reactivating it and updating permalinks, which will hopefully be enough to get the feed to update. Of all the parts of working on a site, RSS feeds can be the trickiest because they don’t refresh easily.

Thanks for your patience; I appreciate it!

Yoohoo!!! Victory!

Okay, Robin, just so you (and anyone reading this thread in the future) know what all I did…

I followed your instructions to deactivate and delete ver 3.1.1 and uploaded 3.1.2. I then regenerated the thumbnails for my images and updated my permalinks. This got the RSS feed for my images working properly but they weren’t re-sizing so I went into the RSS-driven campaign set-up in Mailchimp (the very first screen titled “RSS Feed”) and ticked the “Resize RSS feed images to fit template” box. Note that this wasn’t making a difference previously. Then VIOLA! My campaign rendered properly in preview mode, when I pushed it to my mobile app and in my test email.

Now if I can figure out how to get rid of the “The post blah, blah blah appeared first on…” text at the bottom of the body of the blog.

Robin Cornett you are awesome and easily the most responsive plugin/app developer on the planet. Thank you so much for your help.

Cheers,
Jeff

I’m so glad the fix worked to get the images back! I actually generally advise against checking that setting in MailChimp, as it will stretch small images, rather than just shrink large ones. If you’re not planning on ever using small images, though, you can probably live with that.

I would just ask you to double check that you are using the alternate feed link in MailChimp (although I think you are), because looking at the raw feed, the correct image (350px wide) is being output in the feed.

The text you’re concerned about is a feature from the Yoast SEO plugin–dig in their settings and you can change or remove it, but many bloggers prefer to keep it in to protect from content scrapers.

Thanks again for your patience, and glad you are up and running.

Hey Robin,

It’s Jeff again. I seem to have regressed on the image sizing in my RSS feed. The situation is that I updated my Mailchimp email template design to go to a wider body layout (i.e., no sidebar). Then when I sent a test email I started to getting the same problem with re-sizing that I reference above.

I had updated to version 3.2 of Images to RSS so I went through all the steps we did previously (deactivated and deleted the plug-in, uploaded version 3.1.2, updated permalinks, deleted and reloaded my image). Unfortunately, nothing seems to work this time. Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated.

Cheers,
Jeff