XML Feed Issue

Hi all,

I added a site to a category earlier today, and had no problems with it. The site is a blog, and it also has an RSS 2.0 feed.

So, I also tried to add that XML feed to the same category.

When I did, I made sure that I filled out all entries on the form carefully, and I chose the proper file format.

After pressing the button to submit the feed, I received a message that the file wasn't validated correctly. The message also included a link to a feed validator. It told me to get the feed validating correctly, and then try again after I do.

I checked my RSS feed with the feed validator, and it validated fine.

I haven't included any URLs or categories here because this forum description says not to. This does appear to be a bug though.

Is this a problem that others are experiencing also, or is it just me? Since there is nothing to fix, should I try again?

Thank you, and happy holidays.

Hi there Bill. SEO by the Sea seems to have a problem. It was loading fine earlier today. As it happens I was reading it and I bookmarked the feed in Firefox and it all worked fine. Now what I get is "Fatal error: Call to undefined function: bloginfo() in /vservers/seobythesea/htdocs/index.php on line 5".

Congratulations on the blog, by the way. And good wishes for the merry festive season.

Hi Jean,

It's good to see you.

Thanks for letting me know. I appreciate it, especially this time of the year when so many people are wrapped up in the holidays. (I hope that your's is terrific.)

The problems from this evening are unrelated to the XML feed problem, unfortunately (I know - I caused them).

A little after 6:00 PM, EST, I had the support folks from my host make a change to the vhost configuration files on my computer so that it does a permanent redirect from the non-www version to the www version of the site. I also made a change to my theme index, and returned it to the wrong place. Between the error message, and some uncertainty as to what was causing the problem, it wasn't fixed until a short time ago (about two hours or so).

But, it is still unrelated to the feed, which was working fine earlier today when I tried to submit it, and when you were reading it.

When I run the site through http://www.feedvalidator.org it tells me: Congratulations! This is a valid RSS feed.

I guess I could try to submit it again, but I'm guessing that I will get the same error message.

Thank you again for trying to help.

I'm only speculating here as I haven't looked at how the feeds are validated at different places, but looking at the source for your feed it contains a number of tag extensions that are not part of the core RSS 2.0 specification so it may be a difference in how strictly a validator follows the specification.

Specifically: <dc:creator>, <wfw:commentRSS>, <content:encoded>

Thanks, Callimachus.

The RSS feed is a pretty standard Wordpress generated feed, but I will look into those issues.

I may have to set up more than one version of RSS, and see if there are any of those that DMOZ likes. Hopefully so.

I would guess that there is a validation step to make certain that the page being submitted is a valid and working RSS feed, which mine is according to feedvalidator.org. It would be pretty interesting to see DMOZ do something with those feeds, but I'm not going to speculate on the direction that DMOZ takes.

I appreciate your taking a look. Hopefully I can come up with something that makes the directory satisfied.

Cheers.

Hi again Bill. SEO by the Sea is now working for me (and incidently it has been listed), but there is a small hitch in the headlines displayed by Firefox. Apostrophes are not displaying properly.

Thanks, Jean.

I'm not seeing the odd treatment of apostrophes that you describe in Firefox on the site. I think I need to look at it on another computer to see if I can replicate what you are seeing.

I will be trying to submit a different RSS version to DMOZ to see if that works. I've been a little busy the last couple of days, and haven't had any time to tweak the code, or research the issues that Callimachus so kindly noted. But, I will. I'll return to this thread to let folks know how that turns out.