Comments on: OTB RSS Feed

By: Chris Short

Chris Short — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 21:36:54 +0000

I'm having issues with SharpReader and the trademark character too.

I would call it a bug in SharpReader but if it's not a valid RSS character then it's not a bug.

By: Candyman

Candyman — Thu, 16 Sep 2004 01:20:42 +0000

The square character - same with me. I've been having problems with your feed for a long time now and I'm using NewsGator in Outlook. I wasn't sure if it was you or me but your feed is the only trouble I've had out of dozens.

By: Digger

Digger — Wed, 15 Sep 2004 08:47:12 +0000

I get a "forbidden" error for your feed with feedreader. Doesn't even show the title of you site, just says forbidden before it even shows the info to add it.

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:33:35 +0000

Ack,

Preview messes with the escaped chars, here is (I hope) the source:

Outside The Beltway™

It's the trademark symbol.

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:31:02 +0000

Sorry James, I should have been a bit more detailed in my post. I'm using SharpReader (0.9.5.1) and it's having problems with your title block:

Your feed appears to be encoded as "iso-8859-1", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII" Outside The Beltway

It's choking on the â¢ character.

By: KevinM

KevinM — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:50:44 +0000

Reads fine in bloglines

By: Dale

Dale — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:45:19 +0000

With Bloglines it seems to work OK.

By: Buck Hicks

Buck Hicks — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:23:44 +0000

I have v0.9.5.1 as well as SP2 for the .Net framework that was just released a week or so ago.

By: Boyd

Boyd — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:22:53 +0000

Oh, and I'll bet that character that's not displaying correctly for you is the ™ symbol.

By: Boyd

Boyd — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:21:24 +0000

Buck, I also use Sharpreader and don't experience the problem you describe. I'm using version 0.9.5.0, how about you?

By: Buck Hicks

Buck Hicks — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:20:45 +0000

I suspect that the aggregators that aren't having a problem with it are just ignoring the error and publishing it as is.

I just clicked the link provided by James and it shows this at the top of the page.

Warning

This feed is valid, but may cause problems for some users. We recommend fixing these problems.

Your feed appears to be encoded as "iso-8859-1", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII" [help]

line 9, column 27: title contains bad characters (2 occurrences) [help]

By: elgato

elgato — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:15:02 +0000

I get it just fine on my end.

By: Buck Hicks

Buck Hicks — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:07:29 +0000

By the way if you open the feed in Internet Explorer you will see what I am talking about. That character must not be allowed in XML/RSS pages.

http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/wp-rss2.php

By: Buck Hicks

Buck Hicks — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 19:05:26 +0000

Yes I use Sharp Reader and have been having problems with your feed for a while. I think the problem is with the Square character that follows the Outside the Beltway in the title. I bet if you go to where ever you display your title, go to the end of it and us your delete key to eleiminate the character you will fix it.

By: Boyd

Boyd — Tue, 14 Sep 2004 18:59:42 +0000

I've never had a problem with your RSS feed.

The "required preview" when posting comments is a bit annoying, but you didn't ask about that.

Ahem.