Re: [Ap-com] When did our blog feed break? (Or, last post?)

[Chris Watkins]

On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 13:13, Lonny <lo...@appropedia.org> wrote:

http://appropedia.blogspot.com/ still is receiving the blog feed (you can see it in the top feed there) so is my Google Reader... not sure how that is. Let me know if you want me to look into that. 

Good to know. I know some blog readers are more forgiving than others.

I am sure you have seen this, but http://beta.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fblogs.appropedia.org%2Ffeed%2F shows where it isn't validating.

Thanks - hadn't checked this in a long time. "Blank line before XML declaration" is the big issue, but we've been through the WordPress files, done the obvious fixes, tried a "fix rss feed" plugin, and other things...

If the solution doesn't turn up soon, we might just reinstall.

Chris

Thanks,
-Lonny
http://www.appropedia.org/
http://www.ijsle.org/

On Thu, Dec 17, 2009 at 5:58 PM, Chris Watkins <chrisw...@appropedia.org> wrote:

If you have http://blogs.appropedia.org/feed/ in your blog reader, and it downloads new posts frequently, what is the last post it downloaded?

Fixing the feed is proving very difficult (have tried all the standard suggestions, and more) but a member of our community is working hard on it.

Thank you.

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Chris Watkins

Appropedia.org - Sharing knowledge to build rich, sustainable lives.

blogs.appropedia.org
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[Jason Smithson]

Anything that strictly interprets XML will break on a feed with either a blank line at the top or any bad character entities like the quote marks Chris and I ran into. It appears Google Reader and many other readers will overlook these issues. Feedburner, as one example of a more strict reader, will not. It is very hit or miss.

Chris raised the excellent question of "so what do we use to keep an eye on the feed so we know if it breaks again?" to which I don't yet have a good answer. After some more reading and troubleshooting I suspect we'll find something to monitor with.

Unfortunately I'm not convinced reinstalling would fix it as there are some indications that in some environments and situations stock installs have this same issue. There are multiple overlapping fixes. Essentially a single blank line at the top or bottom of quite a long list of files will cause this issue as will a carriage return out of place in the same list.

Lonny, if we can arrange access for me on the server I'm pretty sure I can track it down and document the fix. I've got a list of links for reference from the research I've done and I've run into this exact same issue as it relates to PHP and HTML. Thanks for the link to that feed validator, it provides some more data that will be useful for improving the feed going forward.

Thanks!

- J.
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Jason Michael Smithson
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