RSS Problems?

[Mikey]

I am very new to RSS and don't know enough to dig into this but it would appear that something is not right on some of the Serendipity 0.8b2 sites.

I get this when I go to http://www.blogstreet.com/rssdiscovery.html BlogStreet.com and have it look at the blog:

The URL has an invalid RSS file

Is anyone else having this problem?

Other than that, the overall operation appears fine if not flawless.

[garvinhicking]

It would really help us to analyze the problem if you gave us the URL to your Blog

The RSS URL to your blog is like: http://yourblog/serendipity/index.rss2 or http://yourblog/serendipity/rss.php?version=2.0 - this depends on your s9y URL Rewriting directive.

Regards,
Garvin

[Tom - Daai Tou Laam]

I played around with this a bit last night (local time) with my blog.

the blogstreet URL gave me the same error about the rss feed being invalid. blogstreet did find the RSS feed and pulled the index.rss2 URL.

http://feedvalidator.org said the index.rss2 URL was valid but there was an issue with content:encoded containing bad characters.

http://rss.scripting.com said the index.rss2 URL was invalid because of the previously mentioned issue.

It looks like it's an issue with encoding of a cut and paste from a news article. see below for the text that scripting.com reports as the error...

"""largely circumvented the "normal channels" – the Coordinating Leadership Group """

The source view of <a href="http://www.the-eleven.com/~tjlegg/seren ... html">this post</a> shows this:

"""had largely circumvented the "normal channels" – the Coordinating Leadership Group on Hong Kong"""

Possible encoding issues within rss for an em-dash?

[garvinhicking]

Tom, as I mentioned before, it would be very handy if any of us just gave me the URL to the blog so I could look for myself

The problem you pointed out is correctly: You entered invalid XHTML markup into your entries. You need to fix special characters either manually yourself or install/use the 'xhtmlcleanup' Serendipity plugin, which fixes some of the errors.

An 'emdash' should be transformed to '-' or '—'.

There's only so much s9y can do to fix your entries for you - it's really hard to stay XHTML compliant if you copy+paste foreign code with weird markup.

Regards,
Garvin

[Tom - Daai Tou Laam]

You need to fix special characters either manually yourself or install/use the 'xhtmlcleanup' Serendipity plugin, which fixes some of the errors.

Ah... the xhtmlcleanup plugin did the trick.

and my blog URL was in the post, though I can't believe I screwed up the link. *doh!*

[Hathor]

Um... I'm having the same problem with http://www.thehathorlegacy.info/index.p ... index.rss2.

I've installed the XHTML cleanup plugin, but is there something I need to do to get it to clean up old posts, assuming that's the trouble?

[garvinhicking]

Hathor, if you're using the entry properties plugin with caching, you need to recreate your Cache (Admin menu, "Create cached entries").

However I just looked at your Feed. You first of got some strange ob_start() notice in there. Deactivate gzip compression in serendipity config, it seems to cause trouble for you.

Second is, configure your Syndication plugin and insert a valid email adress into the managingEditor and webMaster fields. As soon as you did that, your feed will validate.

Regards,
Garvin

[Hathor]

thank you! That did it!