I'm having trouble setting up an Alexa Flash Briefing.

Hi Kathy!

So I've been talking to several people about this, and I think we have some answers.

Firstly, Amazon does not currently support Let's Encrypt security certificates, which is currently used by BLOX CMS. That's why we are getting "Error fetching the requested URL" when trying to add a secure feed. This is a known Amazon issue that they are investigating (but, it has been a year or so that this has been a know issue).

Text flash briefings do not need to be secure at this time, so those will work. Secure feeds will not work until Amazon supports Let's Encrypt, or unless there is another fix.

For regular insecure feeds our network recognizes the Amazon feeder as a bot, and throttles the traffic. This is a protection mechanism against bad bots, attacks, and other invalid traffic.

Usually, we "whitelist" feed scraper based on user agent - this way we recognize the scraper as a legitimate process, and we allow it to have normal access to the site (rather than being restricted as a bad bot). Unfortunately but Amazon doesn't have a unique user agent on their scraper so this method can't be used.

Another alternative is to white list a feed scraper based on IP address... but Amazon does not use a narrowly-defined set of IPs. And, unfortunately, their IPs are the same as any bad bots that happen to be hosted on Amazon's EC2 hosting services. So if we opened up our servers to any traffic from their IPs, we would open ourselves up to a lot of bad traffic.

All that being said, it appears - until Amazon updates some of these methods - that the best thing would be to use a proxy service, which is what our support team recommended. This is basically a feed service that stands between Amazon and TownNews.com to get them to play together.

I set up a test using Google Feedburner. Basically you enter your script into Feedburner, and then get the Google address out, and then put the Feedburner address in to Amazon.

I'm currently testing this. It did let me set up the service, which is further than I've gotten before. But, I haven't seen yet if it updated more quickly than before.

I will let you know how it goes!

Feel free to try to set up a Feedburner account yourself if you want to experiment. Let me know if you have any questions.

I'm going to post this answer in your support ticket as well.

Thanks!

I'm working on this today - any updates and or additional advice? Thanks.

What does your script look like? I had https://www.northcentralpa.com/search/?c[]=news,obituaries,life&d=today,yesterday&f=json&altf=alexa - but Feedburner is not accepting it.

https://www.westerngazette.ca/search/?f=html&s=start_time&sd=desc&l=25&t=article&c[]=news*&nsa=eedition&f=json&altf=alexa

Is the format I used for Alexa and it had not problems with it.

Hi again Elizabeth!

Where you able to get this working? If the original issue was "Can't fetch feed." or something like that, I just saw a post that Amazon may now be accepting Let's Encrypt certificates, so this problem may be fixed.