During the past week, I’ve noticed that this blog’s RSS feed has been displaying content as single blocks of unformatted text. No paragraphs, no working links, just blocks of text.
I’ve had a number of emails from subscribers, too, pointing this out.
After a bit of digging around – prompted by this thread on the FeedBurner forum – I’ve narrowed the reason down to the likely culprit: the latest version 7.7 of PodPress, the WordPress plugin that enables podcasting on this site, which I upgraded to last week.
I’ve just rolled PodPress back to the version I was using before that upgrade, version 6.8. Hopefully, this will fix the formatting problem.
Apologies to RSS subscribers for any eye strain! Please let me know if you still encounter weird formatting. Thanks.
[Update @ 10:16] Yes, PodPress version 7.7 definitely was the problem. Checking the feed, I can see that all content is now correctly formatted again with paragraphs, bullets, line breaks, etc. If you still see bad formatting in your copy of the feed, try refreshing it or reloading it in order to get the latest copy in your RSS reader.
4 responses to “Troubleshooting RSS formatting problems”
Hi,
I came across your blog using NewsBliss and had the same issue.
After doing some research, I discovered that your feed has two descriptions, one that is basic text and one that is encoded in HTML. NewsBliss parses the basic description.
see below:
During the past week, I’ve noticed that this blog’s RSS feed has been displaying content as single blocks of unformatted text. No paragraphs, no working links, just blocks of text.
I’ve had a number of emails from subscribers, too, pointing this out.
After a bit of digging around – prompted by this thread on the FeedBurner forum – I’ve narrowed the reason down to the likely culprit: the latest version 7.7 of PodPress, the WordPress plugin that enables podcasting on this site, which I upgraded to last week.
I’ve just rolled PodPress back to the version I was using before that upgrade, version 6.8. Hopefully, this will fix the formatting problem.
Apologies to RSS subscribers for any eye strain! Please let me know if you still encounter weird formatting. Thanks.
[Update @ 10:16] Yes, PodPress version 7.7 definitely was the problem. Checking the feed, I can see that all content is now correctly formatted again with paragraphs, bullets, line breaks, etc. If you still see bad formatting in your copy of the feed, try refreshing it or reloading it in order to get the latest copy in your RSS reader.
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It sounds like the new version is stripping out Javascript and HTML or using the basic description in hopes of preventing hackers from injecting malicious code into feeds. This security issue will be a big problem in the future.
Shawn
I’m using NetNewsWire and I didn’t notice any change in the feed. I went back and checked and it seemed to be working all right all the way through…still looks great in the feed. But of course, I’m usually more interested in the content, which is always good, Neville.
Shawn, thanks for that info.
Appreciate those words, Dave, thanks.
[…] As I include podcasts at least twice a week on the main blog, I want to be sure the latest verison of Podpress works and doesn’t do bad things liike mess up the RSS feed as my experience with version 7.7 indicated. […]