The RSS feed service is a great way to pipe a blog or website into IFTTT, and build Applets with it. However, not all feeds are created equal, and some work better with IFTTT than others. Here are some common problems people may have.
RSS feed times out
Try opening the feed directly in your browser. If it takes a few seconds to load, there's a chance that it may time out when trying to use it with IFTTT.
Feed not valid
We validate a feed when you create an Applet but tools like the W3C Feed Validation Service may help with providing more details about why a feed isn't validating.
The Feed service also has the following requirements for validation:
- A top-level feed title and a unique link
- A GUID and date for each entry
No new published content
The Feed service distinguishes between new content and updated content. Applets are triggered by newly published content, items that are updated may be ignored.
Below is some example content from an RSS feed. It was published on 2018-11-09 and updated a couple weeks later on 2018-11-23. The originator of the feed content may list entries based on when they were updated, but an Applet created with IFTTT after the 9th wouldn't trigger in this case.
<entry>
<id>https://www.example.com/feed/item/100/</id>
<pubDate>2018-11-09T07:47:25Z</pubDate>
<updated>2018-11-23T04:57:42Z</updated>
<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="https://www.example.com/feed/item/100/"/>
<title>Example Feed Content Item 100</title>
<content type="html">
<![CDATA[<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Sed cursus dui ligula.</p>]]>
</content>
<category term="11" label="Dummy Content"/>
<author>
<name>Example Feed Content</name>
</author>
</entry>