RSS Widget Error

Same happen here. My host doesn′t block anything, they say. They say there is no block of port 80, nor they block blogspot.com. In a new and updated installation of wordpress I placed one feed from a wordpress.com blog, and two different feeds from blogspot.com. Only one from blogspot always works. The other two keep giving the “* An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.” Tried to change templates, widgets and so on in WordPress, all configs in blogspot, no avail. Didn′t find any solution anywhere.

I solved this issue by making sure my server is able to resolve the given address, for example:

wget https://test.mydomain.com/blogs/mu-blog/feed/

If the address is unresolvable by the server, it most of the time means, that the server is somewhere behind firewalls and has an internal ip-address.

Solution:

in /etc/hosts, make sure you put something like this:

127.0.0.1 test.mydomain.com

Good luck.
Marcel

It’s entirely possible it is not your server at all, but simply the outdated RSS parser (magpie RSS 0.51) that’s embedded into WordPress. I came across the following solution which upgrades magpie to the latest release 0.72 on Adam Brown’s KB Plugins site (kudos to Kyle and Lyndsay for this solution).

1. Download the latest magpieRSS package from here: https://magpierss.sourceforge.net

There’s a lot of files in this tarred and gzipped archive. You only need the four .inc files in the root directory.

2. Dump rss_utils.inc, rss_parse.inc, and rss_cache.inc into the wp-includes directory.

3. Near the beginning of rss_fetch.inc, change the call to Snoopy.class.inc to this:

require_once( MAGPIE_DIR . 'class-snoopy.php');

This will work as class-snoopy.php is already in the wp-includes directory and there’s no need to install the extlib directory.

4. Rename rss_fetch.inc to rss.php and overwrite existing rss.php file in wp-includes with the new file.

That’s it. My misbehaving feed came up at long last. I hope it works for at least some of you.

The suggestions offered by Silfani, Kyle and Lyndsay worked for us. We’ve been experiencing the RSS Widget problem since January and I’ve been monitoring this discussion since then.

Many (many) thanks to Silfani, and Kyle and Lyndsay. After updating to Magpie 0.72, the RSS Widget is working great. We’re now able to pull in feeds that were previously returning the “Could not find an RSS or ATOM feed at that URL” error.

Thanks again. Perhaps the WordPress team will eventually update their embedded Magpie to 0.72. But until then, at least this option is available.

I want to thank Silfani for having made this solution available in these forums. I was having the same problem and the file replacements worked perfectly for me.

One thing I did find is that I had to rename the class-snoopy.php to snoopy.inc and move it to a newly-created folder “extlib” under the wp-includes folder. I believe this is a result of how the new rss.php calls for snoopy. But that part was easy to figure out because the errors being throw were completely explicit.

You saved me hours of trial and error. So sincere thanks!