Connecting Your Content: RSS Feed Specifications for Articles

True Anthem utilizes your website's RSS feeds to automatically discover new stories and pull them into your Dashboard. When an article is detected, our system identifies the link element and "scrapes" the destination URL to gather essential metadata like titles and images, making them ready for social media scheduling.

Core Feed Requirements

To ensure our system can read your content without errors, your RSS feed must meet the following baseline standards:

• Standard Formats: True Anthem supports both RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 specifications.
• Secure Connection: Feeds are retrieved via RSS HTTP requests and should be hosted on a secure connection.
• Efficient Retrieval: To optimize speed and reduce server load, your server should support ETag or Last-Modified headers so we only download updated data.

Required Article Elements

For each individual story in your feed, our system looks for these primary elements to create an article asset:

• The Article Link (<link>): This is the URL of the article. It is the most critical element, as True Anthem scrapes this URL to extract all article metadata.
• The Unique ID (<guid>): This is a unique and immutable ID for the item. It is used internally to ensure updates are applied correctly to the resulting assets and to prevent duplicates.

Best Practices for a Healthy Feed

To prevent ingestion delays or missing content, please ensure your technical team follows these guidelines:

• Request Parameters: Our system uses since and until parameters to resume processing the feed from where it last left off, ensuring no content is missed during downtime.
• Clean Metadata: All custom social text must be a UTF-8 encoded string to ensure characters display correctly.
• Time Formats: Ensure all timestamps use RFC 3339 or RFC 1123 formatting for reliable processing.