UPDATE: Here is the link to the support forum post I made at WordPress.com

This text is reposted from my test WordPress.com site:

I am doing some testing of the RSS Cloud protocol (http://home.rsscloud.co/) in WordPress.com (https://wordpress.com/support/rsscloud/, https://wordpress.com/blog/2009/09/07/rss-in-the-clouds/) . I think there is a problem in the implementation, here is my bug report.

What I did:

1. Created a test WordPress.com site ( https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com), checked the feed (https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/feed/), made sure that the rssCloud element was present.

2. Subscribed to the site in FeedLand (http://feedland.org/) (best RSS reader for RSS Cloud support)

3. Reviewed Joseph Scott original blog post on rssCloud support in WP and using WP plugin https://blog.josephscott.org/2009/09/07/rsscloud-for-wordpress/

4. Modified my rssCloud test script (https://gist.github.com/andysylvester/d41a6ee6b3a7d0860c039ccbe3c6147f) for Node.js RSS Cloud server (http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/) to access the RSS Cloud setup for my site (https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com)

a. var urlRssCloudServer = “https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/?rsscloud=notify“;

b. var urlHackerNews = “https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/feed/“

5. Modified function pleaseNotify to display the text of the response from the rssCloud server (my WordPress.com site).

What I saw:

1. Ran the test script (node testscript.js), got the following response:

root@AndyDO-03:~/rssCloudSimple# node rssCloudTestOriginal05.js

testRssCloud v0.40 running on port 2222.

response: == <?xml version=’1.0′?>

<notifyResult success=’false’ msg=’Error testing notification URL : A valid URL was not provided.’ />

.

pleaseNotify: success == undefined, msg == “undefined”

2. Made a post (https://rsscloud4.wordpress.com/2022/12/04/test-post-007/) at 2:18 pm, no response to my test script.

3. Checked in FeedLand for new item, did not see it until 2:28pm (10 minutes later). In testing of other tools creating RSS feeds with rssCloud support, the item would appear in FeedLand within a few seconds. I have noticed that feed readers seem to take up to 30 minutes to detect that there has been a change in a RSS feed from WordPress.com or WordPress.org sites.

What I expected:

1. My script would get a notification that the registration was successful.

2. My script would get a notification from the WordPress.com site when a new post was made.

3. A new post from my WordPress.com site would appear within a few seconds in FeedLand, since I had seen this behavior for other tools creating RSS feeds with rssCloud support

I did some searching on rssCloud problems with WordPress.com/WordPress.org, and found this post from 2009 (http://www.xn--8ws00zhy3a.com/blog/2009/10/rss-cloud-fail) which described issues with notification URLs:

“Still, we were getting somewhere. There were only two remaining unexplained failures. These were WordPress feeds that were somehow failing to connect to my notification URL. Eventually, after digging through various releases of the WordPress source code, I discovered that these servers were actually running a buggy, older version of the WordPress plugin. Regardless of what the client specified, this version of the plugin would always attempt connections on port 80. “

My app is running on port 2222, the notification URL that the WordPress.com site should be trying to contact is http://fedwiki.andysylvester.com:2222/feedupdated. Could someone shed some light on this? Thanks.

After lots of experiments, I came up with the following test command based on the cloud element content of the RSSCloud test site feed:

curl –data “port=80” –data “path=/?rsscloud=notify” –data “protocol=’http-post'” –data “url1=http://rsscloud.andysylvester.com/feed/” http://rsscloud.andysylvester.com/?rsscloud=notify > test.txt

The resulting text file content (test.txt) was as follows:

<?xml version=’1.0′?>
<notifyResult success=’false’ msg=’Only http-post notifications are supported at this time.’ />

I had tried using “https” in the fields in the test command, but got the same response text as before. I think my next step is to look at the RSSCloud WordPress plugin.

Resources:

Everything Curl book: https://ec.haxx.se/

Curl http scripting: https://curl.se/docs/httpscripting.html

Curl command line command for HTTP POST: https://superuser.com/questions/149329/what-is-the-curl-command-line-syntax-to-do-a-post-request

Blog post on release of RSSCloud WordPress plugin (has some example PHP code): https://blog.josephscott.org/2009/09/07/rsscloud-for-wordpress/

Andrew Shell RSSCloud server docs: http://rpc.rsscloud.io:5337/docs

Based on the current results, it seems that my setting of the WordPress Update Settings area in the Settings/Writing is not resulting in pinging the rssCloud server site. If anyone out there has some ideas on how to check this, I would appreciate it (my initial Google searches did not turn up anything helpful).

I also looked at the RSS feeds being properly notified on the rssCloud server (HN News and Dave Winer linkblog) and their <cloud> element is pointing to Andrew Shell’s server. Perhaps my next step will be to modify the WordPress plugin to use that server…we shall see…