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Blog Archive 2005-December 2005-November 2005-October 2005-September 2005-August 2005-July 2005-June

Mon, 12 Dec 2005

Validate your RSS feeds on line

Here's a handy utility. It's called the Feed Validator. And it does just what the name implies.

About once a week I'll paste in a character from a word processor or from a PDF and that character isn't allowed in RSS feeds. My blog software doesn't mind it, just passes it in the RSS feed. Then I start hearing from people that I've posted a bad feed again. (Sorry about that!)

It's usually one of three problems. First, an angled single paren instead of a straight, proper paren. A good one looks like this '

The second and third errors are double parens. One is the right paren, the other the left. Replace them both with regular parens like this " and you'll be fine.

Just hit this handy url and you can validate your feed (or someone else's) to see exactly what the problem is. And while I've found it doesn't do a great job of pointing out the offending line or character, it always gives the correct error message with the right Hex value to match up to your offending character.

Enjoy!

Jared

posted at: 01:26 | path: | permanent link to this entry