OTB RSS Feed
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Tuesday, September 14, 2004
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A reader reports having problems with my RSS2 feed for some time but the feed validator to which he directs me says my feed is just fine and invites me to display an ugly orange banner proclaiming it as such. Is anyone else having difficulties?
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About James Joyner
Looks fine to me.
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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.
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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.
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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
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I get it just fine on my end.
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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]
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Buck, I also use Sharpreader and don’t experience the problem you describe. I’m using version 0.9.5.0, how about you?
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Oh, and I’ll bet that character that’s not displaying correctly for you is the ™ symbol.
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I have v0.9.5.1 as well as SP2 for the .Net framework that was just released a week or so ago.
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With Bloglines it seems to work OK.
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Reads fine in bloglines
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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:
It’s choking on the ™ character.
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Ack,
Preview messes with the escaped chars, here is (I hope) the source:
<title\>Outside The Beltway™</title>
It’s the trademark symbol.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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