RSS feed image issues

splinter

Hi,

I'm not sure if this is something wrong, as such, or whether it's just not something that Andromo does-  but I hope you can enlighten me!

I have an app that is basically a glorified RSS reader, pulling in feeds from various sections of my website to get the latest content. The RSS feeds in the Andromo app are all set up and working, links are working fine, etc etc. 

In the RSS Activity stream, when I enable "show thumbnail images (Media RSS)" All of my posts get a little orange RSS icon next to them. Should it be doing this, or should it be picking up the thumbnail of the image for the RSS item instead? When you tap to view an item the images from the post appear normally, just not in the feed listing.

Other app-making programs seem to have this functionality with the same RSS feeds, but I'd rather use Andromo ;p 

EDIT: Attached a couple of screenshots to better explain what I mean - both showing the same feed, on the left is Andromo, on the right is... err.. some other app creator thing.

andromoappmaker

Hi Splinter,

It's hard to say why it's not working, is possible could you please post a link to the feed so that we can see what it looks like?

The media option does work for most feeds that I've encountered but it looks like the thumbnails in this feed are stored in an RSS tag that we are currently not processing.

mark.

splinter

Hi Mark, thanks for the reply

Here's an example RSS feed; all are created using the same component so all should be following the same format: 

http://thexbutton.co.uk/index.php/all-reviews/menu/action:xml/

Maybe I could try running the feed through a secondary RSS parser... I'll give that a try and see if it works.

splinter

Nope, tried running it through RSS mix and Yahoo Pipes, but the thumbnail images still don't show

zaineart

All the Rss feeds in my app show like this also... which is a bummer when you want the photos to be seen.

zaineart

only ones that work are twitter feeds (whats the difference in their coding)

andromoappmaker

@splinter The problem with that RSS feed is that the images are stored within the google namespace (xmlns:g="http://base.google.com/ns/1.0") which we do not recognize.

Do you know what is creating that feed? We may be able to add support for that namespace when we are parsing the data.

@zaineart It's important to ensure that the images are in the XML as items as opposed to pnly being within the description or summary items.

mark.

mon123

My images are not showing either. The feed is coming from a blog from wordpress platform. is this supported as standard?

splinter

@ mark 

Thanks for the reply. In my case, the feed is created through a Joomla extension called Jreviews. Not sure if that's much help...

andromoappmaker

@splinter - In your feed XML what file is the thumbnail that you want to show?

<g:image_link>http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/2073_fez-title-1335779433.jpg</g:image_link>;
<g:image_link>http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/2073_screenlg1-1335779434.jpg</g:image_link>;
<g:image_link>http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/2073_screenlg2-1335779435.jpg</g:image_link>;
<g:image_link>http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/2073_screenlg3-1335779435.jpg</g:image_link>;
<g:image_link>http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/2073_screenlg4-1335779435.jpg</g:image_link>;
<g:image_link>http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/2073_screenlg5-1335779436.jpg</g:image_link>;
<g:image_link>http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/2073_screenlg6-1335779436.jpg</g:image_link>;

Are there any other RSS options with Jreviews? Perhaps that ability to add media thumbnails? Al of the included images seem pretty large to be thumbnails.

mark.

splinter

Hmm. Yeah, you're right, those are the images that appear in the article, not the article thumbnail. In the XML, there's a link under 'description' for the content item that should contain the link for the image to be being used as the thumbnail: 

<description>

<![CDATA[

<img src="http://thexbutton.co.uk/images/jreviews/tn/tn_2073_list_fez-title-1335779433.jpg" border="0" alt="Fez" title="Fez" align="" style="width: 230px; height: 129px" /> REVIEW - Are fezzes cool?

]]>

</description>

  

Unfortunately jReviews doesn't have any other options for RSS feed creation

andromoappmaker

@splinter Interesting, we use the description for the actual content for RSS items as opposed to getting the thumbnail from it. So at this point I don't think that there is that much we can do. I assume the image displays when you click on the RSS item?

I'm not that familiar with jReviews, but perhaps someone else has experienced problems creating media thumbnails?

Best of luck.

mark.

scrwmedia

I'm having much the same problem even thought my RSS feed is being generated by WordPress.

http://urlybits.com/feed/

Thanks.

Paul

ilstarno

can someone post an xml example how it should be??

uera3d

I'm also having the same problem, and used my rss on another platform to build apps and it worked normally. I need to work here as well as its application was the best I found on the market. Starfish but has problem in rss.
Please any idea?

andromoappmaker

@scrwmedia Your feed does not contain any thumbnails.

@ilstarno Here is an example of a feed that works: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/football/index.rss

@uera3d Please post your feed URL and we will look into it.

Thanks,

mark.

scrwmedia

@Mark - all of our feeds contain images - every single post, be it an image or video post, which other services have no problem detecting. 

I think the problem here is that you're referring to images marked as enclosures in the same way you would mark an audio enclosure or podcast. That is something that most publishing platforms like WordPress do not do.

I wonder if there is a way to add enclosures after the face? Feedburner maybe?

scrwmedia

This plugin may work for WordPress users although it hasn't been updated in a long time - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/feed-thumbnails/

Testing it on one of my other sites, will update once the next post publishes and I have a chance to update.

scrwmedia

Okay defining the image as an enclosure doesn't appear to have worked, (http://unscrwed.com/feed)  I take it that thumbnail has to be defined as "media:thumbnail url=" then...

andromoappmaker

@scrwmedia Currently we parse images based on the media RSS specification: http://www.rssboard.org/media-rss

While your post content may may contain images, your RSS feed http://urlybits.com/feed/ currently does not.

I have not tried it but you might want to look at this plugin: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mrss/

Best of luck with you app!

scrwmedia

Not sure what you're looking at Mark, but they all contain images For example:

<content:encoded>

<![CDATA[

<p>My Grandfather used to tell me that if a chair were meant to be balanced upon when you&#8217;re sitting, then it would have been made with only two legs.</p><p>Clearly this kid never met my grandfather!</p><p><img class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-48449" title="Sitting - Balancing Act" src="http://urlybits.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Sitting-610x443.jpg" alt="Sitting - Balancing Act" width="610" height="443" /></p><p>Have you visited <a href="http://urlybits.com">UrlyBits</a> today?</p><p><small>Posted by Paul to <a href="http://urlybits.com">UrlyBits</a>, 2012. | Permalink to <a href="http://urlybits.com/2012/06/are-you-sitting-comfortably/">Are You Sitting Comfortably?</a> </small></p>

]]>

</content:encoded>

Anyhow, regardless of that, it's apparent that we need to get them in there as using the media RSS spec and I'll work on that.

Thanks for the link to the plugin, I'll try to modify it to use the featured post (it's quite old) instead of the post image as video posts don't have post images. Will report back when I get it sorted.

Thanks again

andromoappmaker

@scrwmedia As I said, your post content contains images but they are not available elsewhere in your feed. Either way it seems as though you are on the right track. I'm interested in learning what you come up with.