I love this simple sidebox and wanted to commend Numinix for contributing it. I use this sidebox with the News and Articles Manager from Dreamscape.

I had one minor problem with the sidebox, but I think I have fixed it, and I wanted to share my solution with any other users of Static RSS News Sidebox.

The problem I was running into was that sometimes when I loaded my site, no headlines appeared in the sidebox. If I waited for ten minutes or so, they would reappear.

To correct this problem, I modified the following file:

includes/classes/magpierss/rss_fetch.inc

I changed this definition on line 386:

Code:
    
if ( !defined('MAGPIE_FETCH_TIME_OUT') ) {
        define('MAGPIE_FETCH_TIME_OUT', 5); // 5 second timeout
    }
to this:

Code:
    if ( !defined('MAGPIE_FETCH_TIME_OUT') ) {
        define('MAGPIE_FETCH_TIME_OUT', 30); // 30 second timeout
    }
This just gives the sidebox an additional 25 seconds to get the RSS feed from the news feed before giving up. So far it has seemed to fix my problem without introducing any negative side effects.

Thanks again for the great contribution!