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RSS Items Text Missing
Why are my RSS feed item descriptions not visible? I can see the news source, the date, and the copyright, but the item title, and item description are not showing up. Not sure what to change to solve this.
I’m concerned.
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Inappropriate?Hello Megan,
Try entering the RSS feed URL (that you entered when creating the bulletin) into your web browser to check that the feed is working properly. If the feed is working correctly try setting the 'Character limit' within the bulletin to 200 or 300 characters (or to your best liking). There is a known bug (case #3414) where if the text doesn't fit on a page, it goes to the next page. If it can't fit on that page, it skips the item. When no items will fit on a whole page, it makes pages that look blank.
Give those things a try and let me know that works.
Thanks,
Jennifer
I’m hopeful
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Inappropriate?That must be what is happening because the text block for the title and description is small, limiting the characters helps but cuts off the RSS feed. I was trying to figure out if there was a better way to manage this problem... What does the 'auto size' feature do? I thought it might adjust the size of the RSS text to fit in the space available, but that does not appear to be happening... Grrrr... The RSS feed text is just too long!
I’m tired of RSS.
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Inappropriate?Megan,
When 'Auto Size' is selected in the Template Editor, Carousel will ignore the sizing in the pop-down list and resizes the text to fill the block. The text will not dip past 6 pt., so that the text is still readable. The text blocks coming in on some of the RSS feeds are so large that this feature does not help. We will be addressing this issue soon, so watch for case 3414 in our Release Announcements here on the forum.
-Jennifer
I’m excited!
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Inappropriate?Okay, back to this issue. I think your auto size feature is totally useless. I need some way to get the first sentence OR a specified # of characters to resize to fit into the #ItemDescription# block. I already have auto size and wrap turned on but it's not doing it. Can someone advice? It really seems as though auto size is not functioning.
Thanks,
Megan
I’m bummed.
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This answers the question
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Hey Megan, I believe the RSS bulletins have an item truncation setting called "Character Limit." You could use this to ensure that the #ItemDescription# value is never longer than X characters. And I think it does its best to find the end of sentences if possible, instead of cutting a sentence off in the middle. Would that help? -John -
Inappropriate?Hi John, Yes, this helps... It just seems that there is a lot of guess work involved. it is hard to tell how text will look on the sign while setting up the RSS feed. It's frustrating, because the only way I can really tell what things will look like, is to wait for the bulletin to come up. It is very tedious. What would be nice is if there was some way to get a more accurate preview.
Also, when I set the character limit, do I want the auto size off?
Thanks,
Megan
I’m arrrgh!
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Inappropriate?A suggestion here. I think you really need to spell out more clearly in your manual, or somewhere, what the various setting for RSS feeds do. Do you already have this somewhere? The difference between bulletins, items, and max items... If the RSS feed is long, how do I stop it from going through several screens of the same item? Too many variable for this to be super obvious.
Thanks,
Megan
I’m flustered.
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Inappropriate?Hi Megan!
Sorry about the confusion with the field names... I agree, there are a lot of settings to tweak, and they're not super clear on the screen.
Our manual does talk about the various fields and what they do, starting in section 15.5.1 "Creating an RSS Bulletin" on page 125 of the Carousel 5.2.6 manual. I realize those descriptions might need clarification as well, so feel free to tell me which ones are confusing, and I'll definitely re-write them to be more clear.
In the meantime, to your specific question about long RSS feeds, you can use the "Limit to" and "Max Item" fields to tailor the length of the resulting RSS bulletin.
Unlimited Bulletins means that the RSS bulletin will create as many "pages" as necessary to display all of the items (stories) in the RSS feed. So if you've got a super long feed, there will probably be several pages of the RSS bulletin to flip through before moving on to the next bulletin.
X Total Bulletins means that we'll only show X pages of the RSS bulletin before cutting it off and moving to the next bulletin in the cycle.
X Total Items means that we'll create as many pages as needed to display a total of X items in the feed. In other words, this setting lets you say "I only want to see the top 5 stories in the feed, and I don't care how many pages it takes to display all 5."
Finally, the Max Items Per Bulletin field lets you set how many items/stories are displayed on a single bulletin. If you set this to 1, for example, you see exactly 1 story per page in the bulletin.
So, in the screenshot above, I've told Carousel I want to see 4 pages worth of RSS feed data, and I only want to to see 2 stories on each page of the bulletin. So, at most, I'll see a total of 8 items/stories from the feed, even if the feed has several dozen items in it.
I hope that clears it up at least a little... Let me know! :-)
-John
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