Feed subscriptions not quite working

External sites
1

I’ve got a few things going on that aren’t quite working:

  1. I subscribe to my zachbarocas.com blog so that posts there should show up at my micro.blog. They do, but only after I manually retrieve them. I selected “Import posts from feed at zachbarocas.com to: zbarocas.micro.blog” for this one.

  2. After a manual retrieval, the posts appear on my micro.blog but not on the timeline, so:

  3. I have a second subscription for the timeline, for which I selected “Add posts to Micro.blog timeline.” Again, this only works if I retrieve the post manually. Further, in the timeline, this post appeared with no link or title. I’ve since deleted it from the timeline.

Which is to say, that what I’m trying to do is have zachbarocas.com posts appear at zbarocas.micro.blog and in the micro.blog timeline.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

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Micro.blog tries its best to be a good internet citizen and won’t spam other websites with feed requests. Sometimes it will take 5 minutes until you see your new post on the Micro.blog timeline. Other times it will take half an hour. Here are some recent log entries from my account:

2023-02-21 21:20:50: Feed: Not modified — dahlstrand.net/notes/feed.xml
2023-02-21 21:20:50: Feed: Downloading feed — dahlstrand.net/notes/feed.xml
2023-02-21 20:49:26: Feed: Not modified — dahlstrand.net/notes/feed.xml
2023-02-21 20:49:26: Feed: Downloading feed — dahlstrand.net/notes/feed.xml
2023-02-21 20:17:52: Feed: Not modified — dahlstrand.net/notes/feed.xml
2023-02-21 20:17:52: Feed: Downloading feed — dahlstrand.net/notes/feed.xml

If you take a look at your logs and see no Downloading feed entries, something is up with your account and you should contact support at help@micro.blog.

If you want “real-time” updates, you could implement rssCloud or WebSub on your blog. There might be plug-ins available that make it easy.

The Sweet Tooth post is just an embedded Bandcamp iframe player. The Micro.blog timeline only allows some HTML elements, like a and video. iframe is not allowed, unfortunately, so that’s why the post appeared empty on the timeline.

When posting an iframe it’s a good idea to add fallback content if you want the post to look good on the timeline. For example, in this case, you could add a link to the album right below the iframe:

:musical_note: Listening to Sweet Tooth by Mali Obomsawin.

Your blog post would then appear like this:

blog
blog1516×658 35.2 KB

And the timeline like this:

timeline
timeline974×260 36.9 KB

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I should note there are very good reasons to not allow iframes – they essentially destroy any notion of controlling the content limits inside of the timeline since they can contain an arbitrary amount of content. So they work great for blogs and RSS as long form, but don’t really make sense in the context of a timeline without each embed type being reviewed and allowlisted as an appropriate use which still might not be enough.

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Thanks, @sod!

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Thanks @jsonbecker!