So… If you subscribe to my RSS feed, either through a feed reader or by email, and you haven’t been getting my posts for the last week or so and are wondering why… well, so am I. Something happened to my feed, and I’m not sure what I might have done or how to fix it. As far as I know, the last time my feed worked was when this post on February 19 went out. Unfortunately I’ve searched and searched the web and haven’t found many clues.
I posted to the Feedburner Google Group. I’m kind of annoyed that it’s the only help system they have, and there’s no way to contact anyone directly to ask a question. I’ve seen a LOT of unanswered questions in that forum and I’m afraid that mine will remain one of them. Here’s the crazy message I get when I try to re-sync my feed with Feedburner:
“The URL you entered does not appear to be a valid feed. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 1: White spaces are required between publicId and systemId.”
Here is my original feed:
http://www.missmalaprop.com/feed/
In my search, the only possible explanations I’ve found are that sometimes this error message can occur when I saw something you copy and paste things into WordPress from Microsoft Word. I avoid doing that, because I know it can cause all sorts of formatting problems, so I don’t think that’s how it happened, but I checked over the html for the posts I’ve made since that date and couldn’t find any strange formatting. I also deactivated a bunch of plugins, hoping that one of them was causing this error, but I’m still getting the same message.
Is anyone out there a ninja master of XML and RSS feeds? I’ll keep investigating this further, but for right now, it looks like you’ll have to come straight to the source to see my posts.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Your feed doesn’t come up unless I request it with a browser-like user agent (i.e. from a web browser or made to look like it is requested from a browser).
When I request the feed without specifying a user-agent I get this 404 page back with the error “The requested URL /dors/miss/6d6973736d616c6170726f702e636f6d66656564.html was not found on this server.”
I don’t know what caused this but it’s most likely the same problem that Feedburner is experiencing when trying to index your site. It’s likely a problem with your web server, but it could also be Wordpress.
James, thank you! I found another feed listserv yesterday and someone responded with something very similar and mentioned the server. I’m going to contact my host and see if they have any clues on how to fix it. Thanks!
I don’t know if you’ve tried it, but the guys on irc were really helpful when I was first setting up my site a while ago.
http://codex.wordpress.org/IRC
If your problem is with wordpress, they may be able to help you there.
James, Sam, thanks so much for your help! I finally got it fixed. The server hints directed me to contacting my host, Dreamhost, and they were very helpful in figuring out my problem! Apparently my version of PHP needed an upgrade and now everything is working smoothly again. Thanks again!
Oooh, this is good to know! I noticed a couple of other sites I read quit feeding…I might need to contact the owners and let them know this might be the problem!
Yes! Apparently it was just a quick upgrade through my hosting from PHP 4 to PHP 5 that fixed it. And it seems to have been causing another site I host not to show up in Internet Explorer, though now that site is working too. Yay!