Making RSS Graffiti

Posting Instagram hashtag feeds via RSS Graffiti

Instagram users!! Did you know there’s a public RSS feed for every hashtag on the popular photo sharing service? Using these feeds as a source, RSS Graffiti can automatically publish photos to your page, profile, or group whenever they’re uploaded to Instagram with a particular hashtag. Here’s how to get set up:

First, open up the publishing plan dashboard and create a new publishing plan. Select your profile or a page to use as the target. If you run into trouble, see our getting started guide.

Next, get the hashtag feed you want to publish. Use this format: http://instagram.com/tags/HASHTAG/feed/recent.rss replacing “HASHTAG” with your desired hashtag. For example, the feed for the hashtag #palmtrees would be: http://instagram.com/tags/palmtrees/feed/recent.rss

After adding this as your source URL, set your scheduling options, click save, and switch ON the publishing plan. The next time a photo is uploaded to Instagram with your chosen hashtag, RSS Graffiti will automatically publish it to Facebook. It really is that easy.

Now just imagine what you can do with these hashtag feeds: marketers can take advantage of crowdsourced content to engage their online audience, or a group of friends can automatically post moments from their spring break roadtrip. The possibilities are endless.

As always, if you need help posting from Instagram, or have questions about RSS Graffiti in general, please open a thread in our community support forum.

Recent Improvements & Bug Fixes

This past week we rolled out a number of bug fixes and improvements. Here’s a breakdown of recent changes:

• We now support feeds that contain root-relative URLs (URLs which start with a /)
• Resolved an issue with videos from certain feeds not being playable inside Facebook
• The minimum image size for thumbnails has been lowered to 50 pixels. Previously, images had to be at least 59 pixels wide and 59 pixels tall to be attached as a thumbnail
• In response to Facebook removing their embedded mp3 player, we no longer try to add audio attachments to posts. This fixed an issue with duplicate content appearing where the player used to be. (Fear not, podcasters! We’re working on an alternative way to post your audio)
• Various other minor tweaks that improve app efficiency and broaden our support for uncommon feed types

As always, if you have any questions, suggestions, complaints, or praise, please drop us a line in our forum.

Upgrade Complete

The RSS Graffiti 2.0 servers are now posting more than 20 pieces of content to Facebook every second. Pretty impressive, right? 
Aside from the shiny new UI, version 2.0 should behave almost exactly like 1.9 for the vast majority of users. If you think you’ve found a bug we missed, please let us know! When reporting an issue to our community support forum be sure to mention any errors displayed in your RSS Graffiti activity log, accessed via the bar graph icon at the top right of each publishing plan. Until we integrate version 2.0 into the Facebook application canvas (our next priority), your RSS Graffiti settings can be configured off-site at beta.rssgraffiti.com.
The RSS Graffiti team truly appreciates the support from everyone who has given us feedback during the upgrade process. The best is yet to come!

Here we go!

As promised, RSS Graffiti 2.0 is now available to everyone. To upgrade your account, visit http://apps.facebook.com/rssgraffiti and click OK!

IMPORTANT: After you upgrade, any permissions errors shown on the 1.9 application canvas can be safely ignored. Your feeds will be configurable at http://beta.rssgraffiti.com until after the upgrade is complete for all users.

ALSO IMPORTANT: The rssgraffiti.com support docs are currently inaccessible. If you need assistance, please open a thread in our community support forum.