[jonass21]

I tried to add/change the rss feeds in xbmc and now there are no feeds on the home page at all. When I go to click edit under system settings it tells me there is no rssfeed file or that it is not parsable? Here is what the file looks like I didn't change much

http://pastebin.com/QhKazV1j

when I first tried to alter it i downloaded the rss editor in xbmc and used that and it didn't work then I tried to just add it in the userdata folder any ideas on how to fix this?

[artrafael]

The contents of the file look OK and I was able to verify those feeds work on my system. Where is your file located and what is its name? Should be:

Code:

/home/<your-username>/.xbmc/userdata/RssFeeds.xml

The filename is case-sensitive, so be sure its spelled exactly as shown above ("R" and "F" are uppercase, everything else is lowercase).

[jonass21]

ah you smart man. I was working with the file located at /usr/share/xbmc/userdata/RssFeeds.xml but I did just look and find /home/daniel/.xbmc/userdata/RssFeeds.xml and it is indeed empty. Strange that there is even a replica rssfeeds file that isn't used, maybe i did it on accident, I will try altering the correct file and post my results

[jonass21]

yup you were right fixing it in the .xbmc file worked, thanks. One more question on this topic, I downloaded LIferea feed reader to test out feeds before messing with the RssFeed file, and I have tried a few that work in there but once I add them to the xbmc file they don't show up in the home screen, any ideas why?

here are some I've tried that worked in Liferea but not xbmc

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=n&output=rss

http://www.mmanews.com/rss.php?channel=announcement

http://www.tmz.com/category/gossip-rumors/rss.xml (for my wife...)

All i am doing is copy and pasting these so I must be getting the addresses right, anyone else run into this?

[artrafael]

You need to escape the ampersand character in XML files and use "&" to represent the "&" as text, rather than signifying the beginning of an entity.

Enter your first URL as follows:

Code:

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=n&output=rss

The other two URLs are fine as-is.

[jonass21]

So if I do like you wrote it still doesn't work, it doesn't say anything is wrong it just doesn't do anything here is a pastebin with the google news
http://pastebin.com/u64Tf2Ec

but this espn one works, actually other than the original xbmc one its the only one that I've gotten working
http://pastebin.com/HxfGmYYN

[thd042]

In the first pastebin you have several squences "&", these must be "&" only. How did you edit the file? Looks like your editor dit the quoting right, and the second "amp;" you entered must not be there.

[artrafael]

You didn't enter the URL correctly.

This is what you should enter:

Code:

http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&topic=n&output=rss

This is what you entered:

Code:

http://news.google.com/new?ned=us&topic=n&output=rss

Note the missing "s" in "/news" and the extraneous "amp;" in two locations of the URL.

The complete XML statement is thus:

Code:

<feed updateinterval="30">http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&amp;topic=n&amp;output=rss</feed>

[jonass21]

Well I copied and pasted <feed updateinterval="30">http://news.google.com/news?ned=us&amp;topic=n&amp;output=rss</feed> directly into the file and it still didn't work, strangely enough now the espn one that was working earlier is not working either lol maybe I messed witht the file too much

[artrafael]

Manually inspect your RssFeeds.xml file after you've saved the file with the pasted line. In a terminal session, enter:

Code:

cat /home/daniel/.xbmc/userdata/RssFeeds.xml

Verify the URL is correct. As thd042 mentioned above, if you are using a special editor (RSS feed add-on?), it may automatically change all occurrences of "&" to "&amp;" to be "helpful". This will result in "&amp;" changing to "&amp;amp;" as seen above. If that's the case, you have two choices:

• Enter the URL without first converting the "&" to "&amp;" and let the editor do the conversion for you
  
• or use a regular text editor to manually enter the URL with "&amp;" in place of the "&" character.
  

Either way, your best bet is to examine the file after making your changes to verify there are no typos or unexpected changes (e.g., the automatic conversion). I tested all three of your URLs from post #4 and they displayed fine on the RSS ticker.

[jonass21]

alright so i opened up the rss file in the an extremely large gedit window, so everything wasn't so cramped. Then when I was putting in all the <feed> portions in I tabbed them over, originally they were all like 7 spaces over or something awkward, then wrote them all out very carefully and now they seem to be working. So I don't know maybe the spacing was getting messed up with all of my edits and revisions and the tabs help sort it out?

[jonass21]

wow alright. It was working great I open/closed xbmc 3 or 4 times and the rss feeds were displaying just how I wanted, I left it alone for awhile, I swear I didn't mess with anything, and when I came back the feeds had stopped running again. Could my xbmc install just be busted? What could cause the feeds to stop working when nothing had been touched? xbmc wasn't even running

[artrafael]

• Maybe your network connection dropped due to suspend/resume or (re)boot and it wasn't restored in time for XBMC to be able to display those RSS feed sites? Are you using WiFi?
  
• Since your update interval is 30 minutes, let it sit for > 30 minutes and see if the feed resumes
  
• Check your RssFeeds.xml file again, using the "cat" command I gave you above.
  
• Verify RSS feeds still enabled in XBMC system settings