Burst Blog

Some of you may have encountered this already: You happen to stop by BlogBurst or your favorite feed reader to see your blog’s posts and on your BlogBurst profile page you notice that all of your posts since last Tuesday are missing. Nine times out of ten this is the result of a broken RSS or ATOM feed.

The good news is that there are some pretty common causes of the feed flu and they can be resolved quickly in most cases. More after the jump

Before we dive in, it is important to note that RSS and ATOM are more like guidelines than standards in many cases. Every blogging platform creates their feeds differently and as a result, every RSS/ATOM based syndication engine out there (RSS readers, BlogBurst, etc) is constantly evolving to handle all the idiosyncratic data formats, date formats and extraneous XML tags coming our way.

Unfortunately, with all these safeguards, sometimes what seems like a perfectly valid blog post can cause the feed to stop being accepted by one or more readers and even BlogBurst from that point forward. Strangely enough, one of the most common causes of the exotic broken feed flu is humble MS-Word If you author in MS-Word sometimes Word puts tags like mso-normal, smart tags and other goodness into the HTML when it is copied into your blog platform. In certain cases the copy/paste can bring over some of the Word generated tags, but can leave the namespace (aka tag definition) behind, which can invalidate the feed.

Now you might say, “I have used Word for the past [favorite number here] years and never had a problem” and you would be right. However, when your feed suddenly stops updating in BlogBurst or an RSS reader, we suggest three steps to resolve the problem:

1. Run your feed through www.feedvalidator.org. This is a great tool that helps spot problems in a feed. While Feedvalidator can sometimes throw warnings that look like show stoppers, try to find the errors that show up in the posts around the time your feed stopped updating. Once there, if the error is not apparent, look for a mention of XML like mso-normal or and you will likely spot the culprit. Note though that sometimes your feed will validate, but will still not update in BlogBurst or other readers. If this happens, go to step 2 anyway.
2. Once you spot the problem, simply go back into your blog platform, edit the post’s in the HTML editor search for and remove the extraneous XML smart tags or other issue. This should then allow your feed to validate in www.feedvalidator.org and will start the flow of posts to your reader or BlogBurst. Again, the common culprits tend to be “mso-normal” and smart tags that start with . This will get things started again most of the time.
3. Use Word carefully. Consider alternative authoring tools that produce cleaner HTML or text only editors like Notepad.

Hope this helps you proactively diagnose broken feeds in the rare occasion when they occur. Happy blogging!