WP7/textitems/reader not opening browser on click

[pheitman]

I have had this skin running for years on the same desktop. I have two instances of it - one that follows standard news sites (nytimes by default) and another one that follows tech news sites. Until recently I could click on any of the headlines and I would be taken to that story in my default browser (chrome). For the last couple of months that doesn't work any more. The cursor changes to a hand with the index finger pointing to the headline but clicking does not do anything. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot what changed?

Thanks.

[eclectic-tech]

I have had this skin running for years on the same desktop. I have two instances of it - one that follows standard news sites (nytimes by default) and another one that follows tech news sites. Until recently I could click on any of the headlines and I would be taken to that story in my default browser (chrome). For the last couple of months that doesn't work any more. The cursor changes to a hand with the index finger pointing to the headline but clicking does not do anything. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot what changed?

Thanks.

Most likely the source has changed the RSS feed structure and the skin can read the item titles but not the link info.

I tried the WP7 Reader using Google News RSS feed URL and it worked. This is the URL: https://news.google.com/news/feeds?output=rss

ooglenews.png

In order to "fix" your skin at the very least will involve updating the RegExp in the Webparser measure to correctly capture the link locations in the feed for each item.

What is the feed URL(s) that are not working?

[Yincognito]

I have had this skin running for years on the same desktop. I have two instances of it - one that follows standard news sites (nytimes by default) and another one that follows tech news sites. Until recently I could click on any of the headlines and I would be taken to that story in my default browser (chrome). For the last couple of months that doesn't work any more. The cursor changes to a hand with the index finger pointing to the headline but clicking does not do anything. Any ideas on how to troubleshoot what changed?

Thanks.

Generally speaking, sites change over the years, some services get introduced, some get removed, some get moved and some are adjusted. A skin cannot automatically adapt to such potential changes if it's not updated by its author or edited by the user experiencing such problems. Unless it's some other issue altogether, I'd say that first you need to check if the site is still providing the service (RSS feeds, I assume), and if so, whether the service uses the same address, type of feed (e.g. RSS or Atom), and basically if it still provides the desired info in the browser for the URL used in the skin. If all checks out at this point, and assuming unchanged / previously working code in the skin, you should see if the skin is correctly parsing and extracting the data from that feed address, given that the said data might be slightly different now.

Anyway, that's not always a trivial task when it comes to querying more complex things like feeds, so in this case, I'd first ask which of these are you using (notice that one is from 2010 and the other from 2020, so maybe the latter works where the former doesn't):
https://www.deviantart.com/fediafedia/art/WIP-WP7-for-rainmeter-157672068
https://www.deviantart.com/fediafedia/art/Omnimo-10-for-Rainmeter-842044123
Now, I'm not sure if these two are 100% equivalent or have the same features you want, but this would be the easy way to "fix" your issue...

EDIT: Well, eclectic-tech beat me to it, but maybe those two links can still help.
P.S. By the way, I also went through something similar with the Feeds skin from my suite, when two of the addresses I used kept providing old data and no data, respectively. The solution was to change the URL one one of them and replace the URL of the other with one from a different site, since in the latter case the service was really dead.

[pheitman]

Thank you both for the quick replies. It certainly helps me to dig in to this more. Looking at the Manage Rainmeter -> Skins -> WP7\TextItems\Reader pane, I can see that it is reading the rss feed correctly (with both the headers and the link parsed correctly). For example, using the NY Times rss feed show this in the log

Fetching: https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml (WP7\TextItems\Reader\Reader.ini - [Feed])
Fetching: Success! (WP7\TextItems\Reader\Reader.ini - [Feed])
Parsing data... (WP7\TextItems\Reader\Reader.ini - [Feed])
Parsing data...done! (WP7\TextItems\Reader\Reader.ini - [Feed])

I will look in to this more - including checking out the newer version of the rss reader referenced.

Again, thank you!

Peter

[Post Edit] I installed Omnimo 10 and now the rss reader is working again! So trivial but I wouldn't have thought of it without the pointer. Much appreciated.

[Yincognito]

[eclectic-tech]

Glad you got it working. Yincognito's advice to update to the newest version was right on!

[Yincognito]

Yincognito's advice to update to the newest version was right on!

More like a guess, but luckily it checked out...