Found the cause for ERROR LOADING FEED DATA message in Joomla

After updating my client's site from Joomla 1.5.4 to 1.5.9 on my host Siteground.com I started seen the following error message on the front page:

Error loading feed data

I realized that the error was being generated by one mod_feed module published on the site's front page.

I also found that the problem was related with caching of the xml feed, since changing the mod_feed module's Cache Time to a higher value would temporarily fix the problem until the cache timed out, after which the error message came back.

After reading blogs and forums everywhere it was clear to me that my problem wouldn't be fixed by any of the solutions I found. This was a different issue. Also many people was experiencing a similar problem.

Using trial and error I noticed that some feeds did work fine always, like this one from CNN, while others didn't (see this other one in spanish). I dag into the feeds' source XML and noticed that the feeds that worked fine were the ones which included the time to live tag. I then theorized that the error could be fixed by adding that tag.

To prove my theory I copied the XML source of one of the feeds that didn't work fine (i.e. didn't include the aforementioned tag) into a text editor, then I added the ttl tag and published it on one of my personal sites. Here is the link to the "fixed" feed. Then I updated my mod_feed module to point to the feed published on my site... and IT WORKED!

I repeated the experiment with several other feeds and they all confirmed my theory.

My guess is that there is some sort of bug introduced in one of the updates that affects the way Joomla parses the feeds. It is like Joomla considers the ttl tag as mandatory, which it isn't. This is as far as I can go, now we need that one our Joomla geniuses go and fix this for us.

Monitor BlackBerry Data Usage

IMPORTANT UPDATE FOR 4.5 SYSTEM USERS: MiniMoni doesn't work on Blackberries with 4.5 system, if that is your case you may want to try the (still free) beta version of MyBoxTone Insight. As a final option, although not the most accurate one, you can install Opera Mini which keeps a counter for WEB traffic (Opera Mini -> Help -> About), which is better than nothing.

If you look for a data monitor utility to help you keep track of your data usage I suggest you give MiniMoni a try.

MiniMoni was developed by Alex Ehnert and comes in two presentations for the 4.1 and the 4.2+ systems.

If you have one of those limited data transfer plans, you will find its "Period logging" feature really useful. You set the billing cycle date and MiniMoni will "reset" the data counter. You can set up an alert in case you reach you data transfer limit.

You can keep a data transfer log for 30, 60 or 90 days. It also displays a live data transfer graphic to visualize data usage, you can disable this graphic when you don't use it to save resources.

Joomla: Setting Server Time Zone

It is not uncommon to have a website display the site's date and time (as opposed to the local system date and time). If you are using joomla you have plenty of resources to do that: some templates include the time and if not some components will allow you to show it.

But then you realize that the date/time being displayed is the GMT time. In case you want to change that all you have to do is to login into your Joomla installation's administrator site and choose Global Configuration on the Control Panel.

The Global Configuration page will show up. There you will find a Time Zone combo box where you can choose your site's time zone to whatever value you want. In my case I chose GMT-5:00.


As usual I hope someone will find this post useful.