Cross-posting From Feeds

Lamb can be setup with a network of feeds so that external content is periodically cross-posted to your blog.

Although each blog supports only one author, there is no limit to the number of network feeds. Therefore, this feature enables the creation of a group or team blog by subscribing to other Lamb blogs, or can help centralize content from accounts on other services.

All feed types supported by SimplePie are supported.

Setup

To set up feeds, add a [feeds] section to your site configuration at /settings, with one or more entries in the format of name = feed url:

[feeds]
Test Feed = https://vandragt.com/feed

You will also need to call the <your_site>/_cron endpoint whenever you want to check for new content. One of the ways this can be done is by adding a cron job on the server or via an external service that calls this endpoint. It’s not possible to check more often than once every minute, and each feed individually will be cached for 30 minutes to avoid spamming the endpoint.

It is your responsibility to call the _cron endpoint, unlike other CMSes you might be used to.

What gets imported when you add a feed

The first cron run after adding a feed imports every item currently present in the feed itself — typically the publisher’s most recent 10–20 entries, depending on how many they include. It does not reach back through the publisher’s full archive.

After that first run, only items published or updated since the previous run are imported.

Checking crawl status

When /_cron runs unattended you don’t see its live output, so Lamb records the health of each feed and surfaces it on the Logs tab of /settings (login required):

Column	Meaning
Feed	The feed name and URL from your [feeds] configuration.
Last success	When the feed was last crawled successfully (or Never).
Items	How many items were created or updated on the last successful run.
Last error	The most recent fetch error and when it occurred, if any.

A feed that fails to fetch (DNS failure, timeout, malformed response) keeps its previous Last success time and shows the error instead — a failing feed no longer masquerades as up to date. Failed feeds are retried on the normal 30-minute schedule. Status rows for feeds you remove from configuration are cleaned up automatically on the next cron run.

Related

• Cron Scheduled Tasks: How to call the /_cron endpoint periodically.
• Feeds: The Atom and JSON feeds Lamb publishes for your own posts.
• Drafts: Feed-ingested posts are saved as drafts by default.
• Site Configuration: The [feeds] section is configured here.