How to Find the RSS Version of Your Feed

by Phil 'iwonder' Guerra

(Mission, KS) --- Ok, lets talk about some basics. In the best of all worlds, when you setup a newsfeed using the DNN News Feeds (RSS) module, there should be a display of basic RSS feed info to help you understand the type of feed you have, in case you have to troubleshoot it. Now, for the real world. The module only gives you an error message when setting up the feed after you've set it up, and the feed is accessed. If a feed has trouble, you usually, just get an error message - ya, know the one 'Download Error'. Of course, this gives you nothing to go on. What's up? What can you do to investigate and fix the problem? Well, in my real world, I take these approach.

Let's start from square one...

1) Always, use a browser first to check a newsfeed for accessibility, and to determine what version of RSS is being used. You'll save yourself a lot of time, if you take this fist step before setting it up in DNN. I know you shouldn't have to do this type of thing, but believe me, this is the real world side of RSS syndication, not just DNN news syndication presentation.

If you can't get the feed to display in your browser, it has no chance of displaying in DNN, because the module code basically does a download of the feed in a similar manner, though there are some differences behind the scenes.

2) Next, examine the feed news source by using your browser's 'View Source' feature'. The way to do it, depends on the browser being used, though. Using MS IE, just right click while on the content of the page, and your default text editor will display the info. Using FireFox, right click and choose 'View Page Source'. In both these scenarios, the display of the source will largely be unformatted and difficult to decipher. I select all of the text and copy it. Then, I paste it into either my prefferred text editor, PFE32, or in Xselerator (both indespensible tools). With xslerator, I can use the 'tidy' button to display the feed in better fashion.

3) I examine the source looking at the xml tag that defines the RSS version, and has information about any custom namespaces that may be used in to define tags beyond the default RSS version tags. This part is extremely importand when troubleshooting DNN RSS news module setups. The information of interest looks something like this example:

<?xml-stylesheet href="http://www.blogger.com/styles/atom.css" type="text/css"?><feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' xmlns:openSearch='http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearchrss/1.0/'>

In the example, we see that the feed is an RSS Atom v1.0 feed and uses a custom namespace defined in the Atom namespace.

Another example, this one is from USAToday, and it says it's an RSS v2.0. Note there are 2 custom namespaces used in the feed. One signals it is an RSS v2.0 Feedburner type of feed, and the other calls Microsoft's custom namespace cf. Both, types of namespaces will have tags that are not used in the DNN News Feeds (RSS) module. Although, both are available for use and are syntactically correct.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss
xmlns:feedburner="http://rssnamespace.org/feedburner/ext/1.0" xmlns:cf="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/rss/core/2005" version="2.0">

Lastly, though not finally, as there many varieties of news feeds, is the OPML feed. This type of feed is really just a directory style listing of links assembled using the OPML spec, which is a fancy type of XML, as are all newsfeeds. Note, this spec hasn't changed much since it was introduced.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<opml version="1.1">

The above are the 3 most likely types of newsfeeds you'll encounter, although each has a variety of flavors depending on the news source provider. All of these basic types of news feeds are supposed to be supported with the new DNN news module, but there are a lot of gotchas along the way. I'll blog about those in another entry.

4) Again, while using Xselerator, I pull in the default xsl file from DNN, and use the 'green arrow' to translate the feed using the xsl. Now, if all is well, then the feed will display, provided I've set up the necessary paramters for the example with the DNN params used in the RSS module. If the feed does not work, it isn't going to display in DNN, but you're not done. The sad fact is - it may still fail after setting it up in DNN giving you a download error, due to a variety of problems. Notwithstanding, incorrect formatting, missing attributes, or the RSS version is not supported.

5) Validate your news feed source. A newfeed validation service allows you to get a better idea of what kind of errors are being encountered. Most feeds you encounter are going to be either RSS flavored or Atom flavored, and the validation service I find most useful is the W3C Feed Validation Service, for Atom and RSS. This is a very important step, as DNN is going to be more strict about newsfeeds following specifications, even though their internal implementation that generates newsfeed doesn't alway comply either. Strange huh!.

Keep in mind that browsers are a lot more forgiving when they present newsfeeds, and that really has to do more with the differences in a browser application and a web framework like DNN. The browsers are more capable of sanitizing and converting newsfeeds into an acceptable presentation. Why? Well, it's a difficult task to judge a newsfeed's implementation.

The biggest problem with DNN's latest module is attempting to allow aggregation of newsfeeds that use different formats. The idea was interesting, but unfortunately, the process is much too failure prone to be useful. My feeling is that the DNN News Feed (RSS) module needs to forget about being an aggregator altogether, or at least allow only similar formatted newsfeeds sources in any one aggregation. Prior to the latest module's introduction, a very workable aggregator was available with the News Explorer module. Unfortunately, now this is broken.

Now, I know this is a bare bones approach without much in the way of a tutorial, but I don't have a lot of time today, so if you're interested in knowing more, leave a comment, and I'll expand on the topic.

Look for a 'Useful Developer Tools' Blog entry for short descriptions and links to developer tools I use, and why.