As demonstrated by this page http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Sandbox/includeOwnRSS the XWiki feed parser plugin appears to fall over when parsing a feed generated by XWiki. Other parsers have no problems. The the stack trace isn't reported with the error so it's a bit hard to see exactly what's going wrong... though I guess it's failing in FeedPlugin.getFeedForce(..). I thought it might be a formatting problem in the rdf template, exposing some fragility in the parser... However, invoking rome as follows (using rome 0.7) works fine: public class Feedread { public static void main(String[] args) throws IllegalArgumentException, IOException, FeedException, FetcherException { // FeedFetcher feedFetcher = new HttpURLFeedFetcher(); URL feedURL = new URL("http://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main/WebRss?xpage=rdf")rdf"); SyndFeed feed = feedFetcher.retrieveFeed(feedURL); feedFetcher.setUserAgent("XWikiBot"); System.out.println(feed); } } So I'm not sure what's breaking when this happens inside XWiki. The reason want to do this is that on my xwiki homepage I'd like to include a bunch of feeds, some external, some from the wiki itself. It would make my life easier if I could use my same macro to display them all, rather than using the feed plug for the external ones, and direct hql queries for the local ones.