
RSS Feeds
The Anatomy of a Localist RSS Feed
<rss>
The opening tag must note the version attribute.
<channel>
The channel tag is required in all RSS Feeds.
<title>
This tag serves as a title for the Feed.</title>
<description>
This tag will just be a brief description of events in the Feed.</description>
<item>
This tag is required at the beginning of each event.
<title>
This tag is simply the title of your event.</title>
<guid>
The purpose of these tags is to note the External ID.</guid>
- An External ID tells our system that content in the <guid> tag is event #1, so each time the Feed imports it will match the previously imported event #1. If your events do not have an External ID, Localist will see each event as “new” during every import.
- The External ID can be anything, like a numerical string or a URL. If you are trying to link to an external website, you’ll have to use the <link> tag. Localist will recognize this as the External ID if <guid> is not present in the Feed.
<pubDate>
This is where you’ll note the date and start time of your event.</pubDate>
- Date/time MUST be in this format: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 03:30:00 GMT
- Time MUST be in 24hr format
- You MUST convert your time zone to GMT or UTC (these are interchangeable)
- U.S. Standard Time & (GMT offset):
- Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5)
- Central Standard Time (GMT -6)
- Mountain Standard Time (GMT -7)
- Pacific Standard Time (GMT -8)
- Alaska Standard Time (GMT -9)
- Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time (GMT -10)
- U.S. Daylight Time & (GMT offset):
- Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -4)
- Central Daylight Time (GMT -5)
- Mountain Daylight Time (GMT -6)
- Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -7)
- Alaska Daylight Time (GMT -8)
- Exceptions: Arizona and Hawaii do NOT honor Daylight Savings Time, so they will always be in Standard time.
- U.S. Standard Time & (GMT offset):
- If the event’s date/time has advanced to the next day in GMT/UTC, this must be reflected in the Feed for it to display properly in Localist.
- For example, say an event in your Feed is on Nov 4th at 7:30 pm PST. When you advance the time forward 8 hours, that exact moment in GMT would be Nov 5th at 3:30 am. So, you would have to write that as <pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2019 03:30:00 GMT</pubDate> in the Feed for Localist to convert it to Nov 4th at 7:30 pm PST.
<description>
This where you’ll include the description for your event.</description>
</item>
This tag is required at the end of each event.
</channel>
This tag is required at the end of the Feed.
</rss>
This tag is required at the end of the Feed.
– Note –
At this time, our parser does not accept images. If you add a Feed with the <image>
tag, our parser will import events as if that tag is not present.