Habitually Good

I have been away for some time (was on vacation), but now I am back. And as soon as I got back, I found myself thick in the middle of action. One of the things that I received was a complaint from a user of one of our internal blogs at office. He was using IE to subscribe to the blog feed (no idea why). And he was getting an error which said this:

"Internet Explorer cannot display this feed"

I never use IE, so I never noticed this error myself. And since the user was new, I didn’t know whether the error had come up recently or it has been around forever. The feed displayed just fine in Firefox and Safari.

This was an out-of-the-box installation of WordPress 2.5.1 and my theme wasn’t doing anything funky with the RSS (this is what most of the hits that I got in my Google search told me to check). Then I decided to examine the actual RSS XML being generated itself.

Off I went to W3C Feed Validation Service. The good thing about this service is that it allows you to validate content as well (while others only allow validation of a URL, not an option for me as this was an internal blog, and hence has no public URL).

The validation was successful, however it did point out a couple of issues which it recommended to be fixed for full compatibility. One such was a “content:encoded contains bad character” warning.

That was my problem. One of the posts on the blog had included a character at the end of the post which was not consistent with the RSS character encoding. It was easy to find because the validation service let me know exactly where this error was. All I had to do was to open the post and remove that character.

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