Feed Problems
Do you have problems with your feed? In a feedreader does it sometimes say something similar to, “This feed has invalid XML.” Or maybe you’ll see a small graphic once in a while by yours or someone else feed in bloglines, fizzle or another feedreader notifying you of a problem.
This used to happen to me and I never knew why. If I continued to post it would eventually fix itself. At least that’s what I thought, in all reality it was the fact the I continued to post that fixed it. And here’s why.
Most likely you used Word to write your post and then copy and pasted it into your blogging software. I used to do this occasionally, one of the reasons was my love of spell check. This was before Firefox added spell check. By using Word, I would unknowingly be copy and pasting the erroneous characters that Word places into each post. That was what was ruining my feed.
I didn’t always use Word though and as I continued to post I would eventually knock the corrupted post off my list of latest posts. In wordpress I usually choose to list the last ten posts. Once the corrupted post was knocked off the list all was well with my feed. And right about that time I’d probably decide to use Word again.
I’ve learned my lesson. And maybe you just did too.