RSS feed doesn't work

Well frankly this doesn’t surprise me. The RSS feed was sort of an afterthought and I have yet to find time to really work on it. I got it as far as not burping up any errors in my RSS reader and left it there until a later date.

I don’t really use RSS but thought it would be a nice feature to add for folks who do. I actually included it in an early release completely by accident and figured I’d just leave it there and that I would get it working 100% soon enough.

Now you’ve called me on it and I’ll have to get it working. Sigh… Always something to do…

Thanks for the nudge btw…

The reason I’m interested in RSS is for email updates. On a previous version of the Carolyn Carter site, I was using plain-old posts for performances. This led to problems with clearly showing concert dates and locations, as well as grouping old performances by performance date (not post date) in the archive. Your plug-in was the answer to all these problems.

However, the one other feature I had with the old system was a way to automatically send emails of new performances to subscribed fans using the Jetpack plug-in’s feature for emailing posts. Since MF Gig Calendar doesn’t use plain-old posts, the Jetpack approach no longer works. However, MailChimp has a nice feature for doing email campaigns based on RSS feed. The emails it produces are formatted better, so I was looking forward to making the switch – once there is a working RSS feed. ??

If you haven’t encountered it yet, there is an excellent online RSS validator to show you the errors.

Hey Ed –

The RSS feed was not being rejected by MailChimp for me – it just didn’t include all the information in the “description” so you weren’t seeing it all there! In the next update I’ll be adding the option of deciding how much information you want to include in the basic RSS information so users can customize it more – and I’m testing it with MailChimp now…

I’m also including all the information as individual custom XML content so a custom RSS scraper could use the information more specifically. I figure that will be useful for someone.

Look for that to be out soon.
Matthew