Consuming RSS feeds in ASP and C# - asp.net

Question

I'm working on making a modification to a site built with ASP/C#, and one of the tasks was to add in the display of 2 RSS feeds - one from the site's internal blog, and the other from the site's Twitter account. However, I seem to continually get empty feeds from both, even though I've confirmed that I'm pointing to the correct URL of the feeds. My code is shown below.
private void GetTwitterRSS()
{
IEnumerable items = Cache["TwitterFeed"] as List<SyndicationItem>;
if (items == null)
{
try
{
SyndicationFeed blogFeed = SyndicationFeed.Load(XmlReader.Create("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/84668697.rss"));
items = blogFeed.Items;
}
catch
{
items = new List<SyndicationItem>();
}
Cache.Insert("TwitterFeed", items, null, DateTime.Now.AddMinutes(5.0),TimeSpan.Zero);
twitterrssRepeater.DataSource = items;
twitterrssRepeater.DataBind();
}
}
private void GetBlogRSS()
{
IEnumerable items = Cache["BlogFeed"] as List<SyndicationItem>;
if (items == null)
{
try
{
SyndicationFeed blogFeed = SyndicationFeed.Load(XmlReader.Create("http://www.rentseeker.ca/blog/?feed=rss2"));
items = blogFeed.Items;
}
catch
{
items = new List<SyndicationItem>();
}
Cache.Insert("BlogFeed", items, null, DateTime.Now.AddHours(1.0),TimeSpan.Zero);
blogrssRepeater.DataSource = items;
blogrssRepeater.DataBind();
}
}
protected string DisplayBlogFeedItem(SyndicationItem item)
{
return string.Format(#"<p>{1}</p><p><strong>{2}</strong></p><p>{3}</p>",
FormatPublishDate(item.PublishDate.DateTime),
item.Title.Text,
item.Summary.Text);
}
protected string DisplayTwitterFeedItem(SyndicationItem item)
{
return string.Format(#"<li>{1}</li>",
item.Title.Text);
}
The code on the page is:
<ul>
<asp:ListView ID="twitterrssRepeater" runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
<%# DisplayTwitterFeedItem((Container as ListViewDataItem).DataItem as System.ServiceModel.Syndication.SyndicationItem) %>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:ListView>
</ul>
and
<asp:ListView ID="blogrssRepeater" runat="server">
<ItemTemplate>
<%# DisplayBlogFeedItem((Container as ListViewDataItem).DataItem as System.ServiceModel.Syndication.SyndicationItem) %>
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:ListView>
Clearly, I'm missing something. From what I've read, I understand that I'm supposed to authenticate myself in order to view a Twitter feed - I have the credentials, but am not sure how to pass them into SyndicationFeed when I load it.
Any tips, suggestions, or direction for further information is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Here's a simple example I would use to receive my Twitter feed (I'm only getting name, update title & id)
public class TwitterFeed
{
public string Name { get; set; }
public string Title { get; set; }
public string Id { get; set; }
}
Then the method to get the feed
public List<TwitterFeed> GetTwitterFeed(string name)
{
List<TwitterFeed> list = new List<TwitterFeed>();
XmlReader reader = XmlReader.Create(string.Format("http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=to:{0}", name));
SyndicationFeed feed = SyndicationFeed.Load(reader);
var tweetItems = from item in feed.Items
select new TwitterFeed()
{
Name = item.Authors.First().Name,
Title = item.Title.Text,
Id = item.Id
};
return tweetItems.ToList();
}
Hope that helps

Answer 2

SyndicationFeed.Items is not a List, but implements IEnumerable interface, so instead of
IEnumerable items = Cache["BlogFeed"] as List<SyndicationItem>;
use the following line:
IEnumerable items = Cache["BlogFeed"] as IEnumerable<SyndicationItem>;