Quick FYI to users of my “Free Stocks Ticker”

To those who downloaded and are using “Free Stocks Ticker”, here’s a quick FYI:

When you add feeds in the options xml, if the feed URL has the character ‘&’ in it, replace that character with & to avoid a crash and losing your options xml file. This is an XML standard, the character is used by that standard to signal many other characters as is documented in this wikipedia page.

To try it out, here are a few sample RSS feeds from financial websites you can add:

<feed>
<name>Coke stock market watch feed</name>
<url>http://www.marketwatch.com/rss/newsfinder/AllMarketWatchNews/?p=word&pv=KO&t=KO&dist=TQP_Icon_rss</url>
</feed>
<feed>
<name>Pepsi stock google finance feed</name>
<url>http://finance.google.com/finance?morenews=10&rating=1&q=PEP&output=rss</url>
</feed>
<feed>
<name>Alteria stock yahoo finance feed</name>
<url>http://finance.yahoo.com/rss/headline?s=MO</url>
</feed>

Another note, for some feeds, like financial news for individual stocks, you might wish to increase how old you want the posts to be allowed, I increased it to 60 for these feeds:

<maxDaysOld>60</maxDaysOld>

Cheers!

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.