Letterhead allows you to add your RSS feed as a curations source, and it will pull those articles in to our Curations library (Stories and articles)
The new RSS block is perfect if you want to set up automations to pull certain articles from your feed based on specific criteria, as well as customize how they are displayed in your newsletter. You will be able to filter by your source, which is the title of the RSS feed, published dates, or keywords.
To get started, review the steps outlined below.
1. Navigate to Newsletters
2. Click on Curations
3. Click on Sources
4. Click on Add content
5. Add a title for your feed, a description and your RSS Feed URL
Note: If you are using an automation, we can set a dynamic title. We will loop through the whole newsletter to find the first heading (from h1 to h6). If there's any, it will be set as the dynamic title. Otherwise, we will loop through all RSS blocks (including new RSS blocks) to find the first title - it's a <strong> tag in your RSS (or new RSS) block content. When you use any layout that's not full content, the title is a <strong>.
How do we handle the super long title?
We will trim it to the last complete word and append ellipsis but the same time the whole character count is no more than 150 (including ellipsis).
6. The crawl feed option
'Crawl feed' will ignore the RSS feed and use the <link> within each item of the feed to go fetch the content from the site directly. We recommend leaving this disabled, so Letterhead takes the tags inside the <item> node, instead of crawling the URLs inside each item.
In other words, if you enable 'Crawl feed', Letterhead will try to fetch content from the URL like in <media:content url="whateverLinkIs">, in the same way we pull from a URL, when you use our URL block. The caveat is that sometimes URLs allow us to crawl them, but sometimes they do not.
If you plan on adding a feed to use with the RSS block, it is best NOT to enable the 'Crawl feed' option.
7. Click on Add feed
8. Then you will navigate to your Newsletters
9. Select the newsletter you are working on
10. Drag and drop RSS feed block
11. Select your RSS feed source
12. Select all days or use exact dates
13. Select how many items to show in feed and/or how many items to skip
14. Load your feed
15. Select from various layout-options
16. Select your RSS display options
17. Adjust your column width
18. Adjust your images
19. Customize your RSS look and feel
