Thursday, May 04, 2006

Gmail RSS feed / Web Clips

Maybe one of you has an idea. Here's a question I recently posed to an online help bloke. I can't seem to find any reason for my inability to do this, nor any discussion of anyone else having the problem anywhere on Google. (Certainly not in their help section!) What am I doing wrong?

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Dear [web guru],

I have had a Gmail account for quite a while now, and I love its many features, including the customizable webclips. Therefore, I am in the process of converting my husband to Gmail (Oh, he'll do it, eventually).

I set up an account for him a while ago, and I recently thought it would be fun to customize his clips so when he starts using it in earnest, there will be items on Mars, robots, Italian cookery, and his wife's latest blog posts.

Now, everything works fine up to the point where I try to add the custom clips. (My blog or our friends' blogs, specifically.)

If I use the search feature, for example: "doctorlizardo", my blog feed does appear as an option to "add". But when I click "add", it says that the feed url is invalid.

I logged back into my own account and tried deleting a few of my favorite blog feeds and re-adding them. They worked fine.

But when I log back into my husband's account, I still can't get it to add those feeds, even if I search using the exact feed address (for example, http://doctorlizardo.blogspot.com/atom.xml --it just comes up nonexistent in the search.)

8 comments:

Mark said...

Sorry, Webclips hasn't been activated on my account yet. I think they've only done a partial roll out on the feature.

"OnlineHelpBloke" would make an excelent domain name though.... and it's available...

liz said...

I think you should grab it, if you can help people.

I noticed that particular guru had a strange variety of advice he was offering...avian flu and what-not.

argotnaut said...

I think they are experiencing technical difficulties. I got the same results that you did, and now I just got "Unable to search for feeds right now. Please try again later."

Got the invalid feed message both for Frinkenstein and my own site.

argotnaut said...

Do you know about the Google support forum?

liz said...

Yes...maybe I just didn't search it right.

Somehow.

liz said...

So I guess basically I just have to wait until someone, somewhere, sorts it out.

Anonymous said...

I had a couple of custom feeds in my webclips and they stopped appearing in the rotation about a month ago; but they were still listed in 'my clips' in the settings page.

So I tried deleting and re-adding the feeds and Gmail either claims:

- No feed was found at the url you provided; or
- Unable to search for feeds right now. Please try again later

And this is the case whether you enter an URL and a specific feed path.

However, it is able to find the feed when you enter a site that it has listed in its predefined feeds (eg news.bbc.co.uk)

Anyway, annoying and lame.

liz said...

Yes...predefined feeds are the only ones it seems to accept for me.

Although I do believe that I'm still getting my original non-predefined clips in the rotation.

So inconsistent and aggravating!