IFTTT and RSS: enclosure anyone?

Plumbing from one website to a platform is not always so easy as it seems.

I’m using IFTTT, from time to time, because it’s the plumbing on the web that we liked about Yahoo Pipes and ol’plain RSS back in the days when the raging discussions were all about RSS or Atom, and also was it better to stick with RSS 1.0 or jump the bandwagom and do a crazy stunt like choosing RSS 2.0, remember?

Anyway.

With IFTTT, it’s reasonably easy to push information from one platform to another. For example, I can let my Twitter friends know I’ve published a new article on my website, I can store in diigo a link to a URL I liked in my offline reader, and so on.

The other day, I decided that I wanted to use Flickr again, because I miss the social quality when I publish pictures here. But I wanted to keep the control I have over the stuff I publish. In other words: publish here and push to the world automatically. And guess what, many people have already thought about that. There’s a grassroot movement called POSSE (for “Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere”) that proposes just that: put up methods so that your content is not published in the silos but published on your own site and then replicated into the silos.

So, I decided to push the RSS for my photos to Flickr.

IFTTT says no problem, and even provides an “automagic” element called {{EntryImageUrl}}. Yes but no, it failed to find the perfectly valid enclosure in my RSS feed: “Action skipped: No valid image URL provided.”

So far, I’m stranded, and have found nothing in the interwebs, and IFTTT did not respond to my tweet (I don’t blame them, I must not be the sole person calling for help).

Any ideas, people?

Comments

  • Alex (1 March 2017)

    Hi.
    The same problem.
    I posted in support, but still silent.
    Do You got any reply?

    Reply to Alex

  • Stéphane (1 March 2017)

    Alex : Nope. Nobody seems to care.

    Reply to Stéphane

  • Nicolas Hoizey (10 December 2018)

    Having the same issue (but with Atom feeds), I found this old official answer on Twitter:

    the image within the item’s <description> or content tag is pulled by that Ingredient

    But I still didn’t manage to make it work… 😢

    Reply to Nicolas Hoizey

  • Younes (19 January 2019)

    I’m having the same issue, anyone found a solution ?

    Reply to Younes

  • jon (6 June 2019)

    I find it the opposite: IFTTT RSS will detect valid enclosure but does not attempt to handle a media tag with an image instead of an enclosure (which seems to be fine according to the W3C RSS Validator)

    Reply to jon

  • JLuc (12 August 2019)

    Same here. Is there a documentation on where from iftt feeds its {{EntryImageUrl}} tag ?
    Même problème aujourd’hui. Y a t il quelque part une doc sur l’endroit où iftt cherche l’image ?

    Reply to JLuc

  • [Résolu] IFTTT and RSS: enclosure anyone? — JLuc (4 September 2019)

    Je crois avoir résolu le problème. Comme indiqué dans la doc, il faut mettre l’image dans la description, et c’est à prendre au pied de la lettre ! Dans mon fil j’ai donc :

    <description>
  [(#LOGO_ARTICLE|texte_backend)]
  [(#INTRODUCTION|texte_backend)]
</description>

    Reply to JLuc

  • Stéphane (5 September 2019)

    JLuc : Je testerai ça. Tu es fort, tu sais ? :)

    Reply to Stéphane

  • Stéphane (5 September 2019)

    (Et du coup ça permettra aussi aux gens qui lisent le flux RSS mais dont le client n’affiche pas les enclosures de profiter de tout ça.)

    Reply to Stéphane

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