RSS feeds don’t work

­
Justified Image Grid error: there are no images to show, the items are empty.

This happens when the feed does not contain any images. Having the item simply link to an is not the way to go. Images need to be in the feed as either:

Make sure your feed contains images. If it does, and you are still getting the error then JIG was unable to determine the dimensions of images. Please contact support.

If your feed URL begins with https, then check this out (may solve your problem even though it seems unrelated): SSL errors.

The page is half-empty and/or shows "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded"

At the first time you are checking out the gallery that is based on an RSS Feed, JIG has to determine and cache dimensions of every image. This only happens once. Local installations, slow servers, large feeds or any combination of these can cause the script to run out ouf time.  Reload until the error goes away. With each reload, more and more images will have been already cached.

The requested RSS feed cannot be loaded at this time.
  • This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters.
  • The data could not be converted to UTF-8. You MUST have either the iconv or mbstring extension installed. Upgrading to PHP 5.x (which includes iconv) is highly recommended.

In this case there are encoding problems in the feed and/or some special characters prevent it from working. The go-to solution is simple. Put your feed through Google FeedBurner (requires a Google account) and use their result URL instead. It'll output a standard format feed, just in case your original feed and the SimplePie parser in WordPress are not compatible with each other. Your server setup may be a local staging area, where the setup is unusual and is not the same as the production environment.

It can also be that you've supplied a standard website URL to the RSS feeds feature of JIG. Make sure you don't link to a website but to an actual feed instead. The only exception is when you add YouTube URLs since they discontinued RSS feeds support. There is certain dedicated levels of compatibility so JIG accepts standard YouTube URLs, but for everything else you must use the feed URL.

Helpful?  Yes  No 0% found this satisfactory.
This troubleshooting fix was posted in External content sources on June 17, 2015