I like FeedBurner a lot; it gives me great stats for my feeds, and adds some nice features to them.
However, one of those features can actually be a problem: it silently fixes some errors in feeds. Sounds good, doesn’t it? The problem with silent corrections, however, is akin to the way Internet Explorer displays HTML with errors: because of that, people may not notice them for a while, and unsolved errors tend to accumulate.
However, FeedBurner does complain of problems in feeds when adding a new one, and that’s how I spotted this yesterday; I was adding a new blog’s feed to it (no, I’m not that crazy, this one isn’t mine, it’s just on my server :)), and it complained. The feed didn’t start with the <xml> tag, as it should, but with 2 blank lines; XML feeds must begin with that tag. I checked my other blogs’ feeds, and they all had the same problem.
But it was a simple WordPress 2.0.2 installation, with the default theme, and just a “hello world” post… what was happening? I had, however, enabled 3 plugins first. Disabling them all corrected the problem, so it was a simple case of re-enabling them one at a time and find the culprit. It was one I had copied & pasted from a web interface to subversion, and it had a couple of blank lines outside the <?php ?>.
The problem was that, due to FeedBurner silently “fixing” this in its versions of the feeds, I never became aware of this. It had been this way for weeks.
It’s stuff like this that teaches us that, unlike what would appear at first, it’s better to stop at an error than to silently “fix” it and proceed anyway.
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Hello there. I’d actually be surprised if we were able to fix that … if we get an XML error in the source feed, what we’ll usually do is 1) write an entry to the publisher’s FeedBulletin to let them know there’s a problem (see your “My Account” page for more info on that), and 2) return the “last-known-good” version of the feed. Maybe #2 is what you’re referring to? But then it would have looked like your feeds were frozen and not updating for weeks.
Anyway, thanks for posting, and we’ll be sure to watch for this situation.
Eric Lunt
CTO, FeedBurner