Ok, always, always, always inpect the source newsfeed if you want to understand what's happening. I simply open the feed using IE, it's the browser loaded on my windows workstation, you can use whatever you want, and choose to View Source. This allows me to view the raw rss/xml being feed by the news source. You won't have much control over what they decide to supply, and any customized xsl will not doubt have to be revisited to account for any formatting changes they make - and trust me - they will change thier format. My advice is to keep any customization as simple as possible. While they may supply a lot of data in custom tags, including images and video, my experience with all news source providers is they will change formats every couple of months, just to keep folks from using their feeds w/o following any news source attribution, or just to enhance the look and feel of it themselves.
That being said, here's what I see....
First, it's an RSS v2.0, simple implementation w/o other namespaces, so far so good, and that's why you prolly chose to use a customized xsl. DNN defaults to RSS v0.91 rss support.
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>AEC</title>
<link>http://www.myalleghenyeast.com</link>
<description>AEC</description>
<language>en-US</language>
<copyright>Copyright 2007 by My Allegheny East Conference</copyright>
<webMaster>support@creativeness.com</webMaster>
Now, the issues you see are related to how the news provider is giving you the data within the RSS elements. Take a look at these to Item elements...
<item>
<title> - Official Release about Elder Cheatham</title>
<description> This is the official information regarding the health of Allegheny East Conference President, Cha...</description>
<link>http://www.myalleghenyeast.com/news/tabid/297/Default.aspx</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>http://www.myalleghenyeast.com/news/tabid/297/Default.aspx?ItemId=55</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title> - Camp Meeting Schedules and Special Programs!</title>
<description> 2008 Camp Meeting is under full swing with ten days of uplifting programs for the entire family. T...</description>
<link>http://www.myalleghenyeast.com/news/tabid/297/Default.aspx</link>
<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
<guid>http://www.myalleghenyeast.com/news/tabid/297/Default.aspx?ItemId=51</guid>
</item>
Note the spaces and dashes in the TITLE element and the spaces before the text in the DESCRIPTION element.
Both of these elements illustrate how some news providers don't really understand the real beauty of RSS as a tool to provide standardized data. Some will include HTML to 'help' format their feed for you, while others try to format it within the element itself in this type of haphazard way. I am a big fan of using CSS to do formatting, and provide RSS with text content only. Seems to work better for all, when done that way, but that's my pref, but if I could I would disallow any other type of usage.
Ok, now how to deal with these issues...
Fortunately, XSL includes a number built-in functions to manipulate text, and that's would I would recommend boning up on.
-
starts-with(main_string, prefix_string)
-
contains(containing_string, contained_string)
-
substring(string, offset, length)
-
substring-before(string, marker-string)
-
substring-after(string, marker-string)
-
string-length(string)
-
normalize(string)
-
translate(string, replaced_text, replacement_text)
-
concat(string1, string2, ...)
I don't have time to give you specific examples, but plenty of my earlier posts offer examples, and just google on XSL string functions to get many more examples. Since your doing xsl, it's pretty much all works, with the exception of using some include and programming calls that could cause security issues.
Hope that gets you enough to get around these little annoyances.