The href link for my site's rss is empty

Developer help Self-hosting
1

A subscriber recently mentioned to me that my https://site.mydomain.com/rss feed wasn’t working. A browser will return the xml page, but an RSS reader says the link is empty.

Viewing the page source shows an empty href:

    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="My Site Title" href="" />

I know that there’s an option for setting up custom rss feeds via routes, but I was under the impression that Ghost would create the default rss feed automatically. I’ve gone through the admin area but can’t find where I may have changed this, nor can I find an rss reference in index.hbs or default.hbs.

Any ideas where I can fix this?

2

Temporary switch to a different theme and re-check. If that fixes the problem, you’ve isolated the problem to your theme.

Otherwise provide your version of Ghost, your theme and mention any customizations you’ve made to your install.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply and sorry for my tardiness in getting back to you.

Switching to default Casper theme didn’t restore the href.

I’m using Ghost v5.23.0 with a mysql8 database, selfhosted with docker, and using the Liebling theme. In terms of customizations I’ve made a number of CSS modifications, including hiding the footer’s social nav bar which has built in facebook, twitter and RSS buttons .m-footer-social{visibility:hidden} but I wouldn’t have expected that to remove the rss href, and can confirm that making it visible again didn’t make any difference.

I’ve made a few changes to the default.hbs and index.hbs files but kept the originals and cannot find any reference to rss href in either. Using the originals didn’t make a change either. I have the following in my footer.hbs, which suggests that the href should be passed through from the footer.

<footer class="m-footer">
  <div class="m-footer__content">
    {{#if @site.secondary_navigation}}
      <nav class="m-footer__nav-secondary" role="navigation" aria-label="{{t "Secondary menu in footer"}}">
        {{navigation type="secondary"}}
      </nav>
    {{/if}}
    <nav class="m-footer-social">
      {{#if @site.facebook}}
        <a href="{{facebook_url @site.facebook}}" target="_blank" rel="noopener" aria-label="Facebook">
          <span class="icon-facebook" aria-hidden="true"></span>
        </a>
      {{/if}}
      {{#if @site.twitter}}
        <a href="{{twitter_url @site.twitter}}" target="_blank" rel="noopener" aria-label="Twitter">
          <span class="icon-twitter" aria-hidden="true"></span>
        </a>
      {{/if}}
      <a href="{{@site.url}}/rss" aria-label="RSS">
        <span class="icon-rss" aria-hidden="false"></span>
      </a>
    </nav>

Obviously I’m missing something in all this (I’m self taught and can’t claim to understand everything yet) so any direction you could point me in would be greatly appreciated.

4

The issue might be with the RSS reader. You mentioned the /rss URL. Look what happens when a raw HTTP request is to made to it:

image

The web server has responded to communicate that the resource has moved and the client, the RSS reader in this case, should make a second request to /rss/ instead, with additional slash. The RSS reader might not be following the redirect.

The missing href in your theme could be a separate issue, but shouldn’t stop a request to /rss/ from working.

So tell your subscriber to try /rss/ instead of /rss. If that’s the issue, they should consider filing a bug with their RSS reader project or update their own configuration to allow following redirects.

Als

6

Figured it out, it was Cloudflare’s managed challenge causing issues for RSS readers.

Thanks for your help.