Question

Im making a website on a local environment. Im having trouble getting an RSS feed to work, but I think it may be due to my local environment not an issue with the code. For diagnostic purposes I decided to use the code from wikipedia:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
    <title>RSS Title</title>
    <description>This is an example of an RSS feed</description>
    <link>http://www.someexamplerssdomain.com/main.html</link>
    <lastBuildDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2010 00:01:00 +0000 </lastBuildDate>
    <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>

    <item>
            <title>Example entry</title>
            <description>Here is some text containing an interesting description.</description>
            <link>http://www.wikipedia.org/</link>
            <guid>unique string per item</guid>
            <pubDate>Mon, 06 Sep 2009 16:45:00 +0000 </pubDate>
    </item>

</channel>
</rss>

This is in a file called feed.feed. When I navigate to the file in a browser and view it with google reader I get the message ‘The feed being requested cannot be found’. Is the code correct and does this defiantly mean its an issue with my environment set up?
Thanks

Answer 1

If you’re storing the file on your local hard drive and navigating to it with a file: URL, of course Google Reader can’t access it. They need the feed to be published on the web somewhere; they don’t have the ability to hack your local PC over the network and fetch your files (or, at least, they’re not going to reveal that they have do this ability simply to display RSS feeds for you.)