Blog RSS feed

Posted on by John

I got an email from someone saying the RSS feed for this site stopped working. Anyone else having this problem?

I subscribe to my RSS feed and it’s working fine for me. It may be that there are variations on the RSS feed, and the version I’m using works while the variation some others use is not working.

I’m subscribed to

http://www.johndcook.com/blog/feed/

and that works as far as I know.

Update: The problem may have something to do with the Firefox Livemarks plugin. If you use a different RSS reader and have been having problems, please let me know.

Update: I removed one non-ASCII character from the site and that fixed at least one person’s problem with the RSS feed.

Update: Someone said changing http to https in the feed URL fixed their problem.

By the way, if you’re a blogger, I highly recommend subscribing to your own feed. Otherwise you may not know of problems. I have emailed multiple bloggers to tell them of problems with their RSS feed that they were unaware of, such as displaying LaTeX source code rather than rendered LaTeX images, for example.

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14 thoughts on “Blog RSS feed”

  4. I use the same feed URI, using feedbin as the backend and Reeder on the front end, and it’s always fine.

    And that’s a very good idea about subscribing to your own feed.

  9. Ian Z aka nobrowser

    I get the items via rss2email and I see no problem with your feed.

    IMO, “stopped working” is not actionable unless some additional detail is provided.

    One problem I used to have with rss2email was that some feeds embed the entire articles as HTML, and do nothing about wrapping the lines in the content to a sane width. When rss2email would try to send such items over email, the MTA would reject them because the long lines violated the SMTP standards. I solved this by switching to the “maildir” backend of rss2email, which stores the items directly in a local directory instead of mailing them.

    —
    Ian

  11. Tim

    I get a parsing error for the feed with Liferea. Using the program xmllint also shows a parsing error:

    % wget https://www.johndcook.com/blog/feed/ -O johndcook-feed.xml
    % xmllint johndcook-feed.xml
    johndcook-feed.xml:739: parser error : CData section not finished

    The source seems to be a single invisible character in the article https://www.johndcook.com/blog/?p=215014 in the word Michal\u2402ek. It contains the Unicode character U+2402 (Symbol For Start of Text). Removing this character solves the parsing error for Liferea and xmllint.

  12. Tim

    Correction: The feed contains the control character “Start of Text” (ASCII 02). It was only translated to U+2402 when copied from the browser.

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