RSS - Consumer Indegestion

As well as problems generating my own RSS feeds, I've been banging my head against the Adobe brick wall as far as consuming RSS is concerned.

Dreamweaver8 is my weapon of choice for development (so shoot me), and I tried a few months ago to get the BBC's Rugby Union RSS feed added to my rugbypix.com page. Adobe have a tutorial which explains a lot. Trouble was, I did everything they said, and on my localhost test environment, I kept getting an error message:

MM_XSLTransform error:
"http://newsrss.bbc.co.uk/rss/sportonline_uk_edition/rugby_union/rss.xml" is not a valid XML document.
The underlying connection was closed: Unable to connect to the remote server.

The claim that it wasn't a valid XML document was obviously rubbish, since the BBC's feed works in all the feed readers I've tried! Googling for the error didn't produce anything sensible, so I shelved the project and put it on the back burner for a while.

Returning to it this afternoon, I tried uploading the XSL fragment (which does the data repeat for the feed) and the page in which the transformation is called, onto my live server. I got a different message - the MM_XSLTransform.cs file was missing - progress! I knew that on my previous attempts, the only transform I could find available was the MM_XSLTransform.vb file, which was the wrong server model for my site.

Another quick google for the C# transform got me to this page. And, voilà! a link to download the missing MM_XSLTransform.cs. Bung it in the includes/MM_XSLTransform/ folder and upload it to the site, and Bob's your uncle... BBC Sport Rugby Union feed at rugbypix.com

Great, another niggling problem ticked off my list!