Silly Question

[chadi]

Hello, Earth to Support

I never got a responce here, is this support a one man show or...? Anyone feel free to tell me where I am going wrong.

Thanks
Chadi

P.S.
See feeds listed above

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I never got a responce here, is this support a one man show or...?

With a statement like that, you'll likely NEVER get any suport anywhere. Ask yourself what you pay for your support. Nothing. Good. Then be happy about everything you get.

If you enter your feed urls correctly, it should work, like I mentioned. instead of using feed://bla.site.com/blur.xml you need to enter http://bla.site.com/blur.xml.

Regards,
Garvin

[chadi]

My comment was directed to anyone who could help, you seem to be the only one who answers. I know you goal is to have a product that is very user intuitive, some things just don't seem that way to me, from a non PHP writer perspective. I need help if their is little documentation that's the bottom line. I don't know what the goals are with the product but you want people to use it, if I can't use it then who wins? No disrespect here intended. Tell me if I am not working hard enough but I have looked on the forum and the FAQ, there is no other place to look. I want to find the answers myself but when I can't, what to do? I have changed the links to the feeds and they don't work. I beleive I am in error with the config. All I have to offer is that they open in IE. My question is, if they do open in IE, should it work then in Serendipity? How about this... Give me one feed you know works, I will configure it and try to work from there.

Regards
Chadi

[Don Chambers]

Chadi - my personal opinion is that the serendipity community is - by far - the MOST responsive community in the CMS world, and that especially includes comparison to e107, one of your earlier referenced comparisons (there really is no comparison - that is not a blog centric cms). That responsiveness is exactly why I personally decided to try and give something back when I am in a position to do so!

However, you also need to appreciate the user and developer population size. Garvin busts his butt to support s9y, and a few of us, myself included, know enough to be dangerous, and occasionally, actually manage to help others. This is not a paid position - I have personally NEVER received a penny for any help I have provided on this forum!!! Have you ever offered Garvin, or anyone else, something to express your appreciation? A beer? Cup of coffee? Wishlist item?

I have also noticed something else - often, when someone competent begins to answer a "I have a problem" thread, the balance of those who might be able to help step back and allow that person to offer their assistance without interference from others (unless they have a different opinion, or better solution). This allows us to then focus on other "I have a problem" threads while someone like Garvin focusses on your issue.... more people get assistance this way!

Anyway, hope you can cut Garvin some slack, and preferrably, show him both respect and appreciation. You are receiving assistance from the person most qualified to provide it. Consider yourself lucky and be patient.

Your request is quite unique. Nowhere did I see a link to your site... that sort of info definitely helps in the troubleshooting process. Continue the dialog with Garvin and allow him to help you.

Meanwhile, as your problems arise, and solutions are found, feel free to find YOUR opportunity to give something BACK to the community.

[chickens]

I have changed the links to the feeds and they don't work.

If you would have stated that rather than "earth to support" someone might want to help you out.

Here are some facts about open source projects:
- They are free.
- The support is free
- Most if not all deveoplers and "support staff" work for free
- You flame, we flame you back and insult your mother along the way

I've been part of several open source projects and these are the features of each that are common. This community is the least prone to the last section, but it still will happen.

The main post to my post is that everyone here is doing this because they believe in the project. I believe that s9y is the best blogging type CMS out there and I want it to continue to grow.

With posts like yours it makes all of these people not want to help you. If you want to blame someone for your problem I suggest paying someone first. The reason many companies use Microsoft products is so that they can have someone to blame when it breaks. If they all used open source software it would be much harder to do that.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

I'll simply disregard the rest and try to focus on the problem at hand; Don and chickens already expresssed the "other stuff".

A feed that works for me is:

http://blog.s9y.org/rss.php

That one can be used to import to the aggregator.

There is one other thing that might be responsible for your trouble, being a firewall of your webserver. Are you able to use the Spartacus plugin to download plugins over the web? Or are you able to send trackbacks to other sites? Or use the 'Announce entries' plugin? Only if one of those works, your server is not firewalled. If all three don't work, this is a proof that your host is simply incapable of fetching a remote ressource.

Let's work from there.

Regards,
Garvin

[chadi]

All nonsense aside, my plea was perhaps a weak attempt at humor, the forum seems a bit sleepy that's all. I am a Network Engineer so I have the utmost respect for IT types and I am a big promoter of Open Source. As far as Donations a wonderful idea, my immediate goal is to get my site up for our church and get the site as automated as possible, I am pretty busy too you can imagine in my work.

At last results, Garvin I setup your rss feed, my results were the dates only with no hyperlink. What I was hoping to have ultimately is to be able to have a ticker type effect with the feed but I will take what I can get. Does this look like something on my host or...?

Thanks
Chadi

[garvinhicking]

Hi chadi!

What do you mean with "dates only with no hyperlink"? A URL or screenshot would help.

Did you turn on the debugging of the RSS aggregator? That can help a lot when importing feeds that donot seem to work.

You will not get a feed ticker effect with the plugin, though. Tickers are something different thatyou would emebedd into the sidebar. There are widgets like feedburner that offer a javascript that showscontents of a rss feed as tickers, and other services. For that you don'T need to "import" the articles into your blog, like the plugin does.

Regards,
Garvin

[chadi]

Hello Garvin,

Ok here is the link http://islamaugme.bzhost.net/serendipity/index.php
I don't know how to turn on debugging, could you point me in the right direction? As far as a ticker let me master the plugin before I get crazy:)
Also on the link you will notice some errors on the HTML Plugin Sidebar, I asked my provider about it and this is what he said...

<The error you received is a generic PHP error. Check your foreach loops on the mentioned lines: what objects are used there? Try to track where those objects are created, as it seems they are not properly initialized..I guess we can do something from that moment on.. >

Anything I can do to check this out?

Thanks Immensely
Chadi

[garvinhicking]

Hi chadi!

Check your sidebar plugin where you entered the blog.s9y.org/rss.php feed address. Inside that plugin you can configure which element to display. Currently it might be set to "content" or "description". For s9y's feed you need to set that to "content:encoded" to properly see content.

About your categories sidebar PHP error: You are using the DHTML TreeMenu Category plugin, this only properly works if you have created at least one category in your blog. Create one, and the error goes away.

Regards,
Garvin

[chadi]

As far as your feed, I made that change no news yet, I'll keep an eye on it.
http://islamaugme.bzhost.net/serendipity/