Feeds Stopped working

[robw]

The feeds for my site seem to have stopped working, and I can't figure out why. I upgraded to version 1.03-beta recently, but am not sure if they were not working prior to this.

I have tried the xml cleanup plugin (suggested in another thread), but this made no difference. In Safari, the feeds just return a “unknown error” (NSURLErrorDomain:-1) error. In explorer the xml shows. It fails in various readers.

The site is : http://www.hypnotherapyregister.com/register/

Any help much appreciated!

Cheer
Rob

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

It seems that you have edited some PHP file and introduced a blank line either BEFORE the first <?php or after the last ?> of that file. Because the first line of your RSS feed is no longer the XML info, but that blank line from one of your templates.

Best regards
Garvin

[robw]

Thanks Garvin,

As always, you are a superstar. I found that there was a line after the ?> in the template config.in.php file, which I have now removed and the site RSS has magically re-appeared!

Cheers
Rob

[JWalker]

Hi!

It seems that you have edited some PHP file and introduced a blank line either BEFORE the first <?php or after the last ?> of that file. Because the first line of your RSS feed is no longer the XML info, but that blank line from one of your templates.

Best regards
Garvin

What this means:
-- blank line before '<?php' or
-- operator (some HTML code) before '<?php' that emits a blank line ?

I have exactly same problem, but did not doscovered in which file is the 'bug'.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Sadly this blank line can happen in ANY of the files you have edited or uploaded. It is often casued by editors that add \r\n or \n to the output somewhere, often because of windows file editors.

Sadly you have to go through every file you ever modified. usual causes are plugin files, template configuration file, language files.

Sadly there's no automatism to find out.

Best regards,
Garvin

[JWalker]

Thanks for the reply. Indeed, I am under Windows and have edited (dont know how many) files with MS VStudio editor. I found several files in the root s9y directory with empty line after last '?>'. As I suspect there are many. With enough persistence, I will find out ... .
Tnx.

P.S. Some files have not closing '?>' at the end. What about them ?

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Actually if a file does not have a closing ?>, this is the best way. Because with this, no blank lines can be added after the document. A closing ?> is not required, so it's the easiest way to help people get rid of at least that blank line bug at the end of a file.

Regards,
Garvin

[robw]

Hi JWalker,

What I did to narrow it down is to change the template back to the default one and check to see if the RSS started working again - which it did.

This told me that the issue was with one of my custom template files and by process of elimination I was able to find it.

(Becuase of the way S9Y cleverly backfills any missing files in a template with the ones from the default version, you can try renaming each of your template files in turn to turn them off and narrow down the problem file.)

Hope this helps!
Cheers
Rob

[sparkx]

I am struggling with the feeds as well.

It's strange though, if I click the rss feed links in firefox, I can see the output, but when I subscribe to them in NetNewsWire, it shows no posts. The atom feed gives an error in firefox, and no posts in the reader. And strangely, the comments feed works like it should.

I thought it might be the blank line issue, and did find a couple files with that, but even after repair the problem remained. I did a default install to another folder on the server to check and make sure it wasn't an issue with my host. Subscribing to those feeds worked just fine. So, I made a guess that something I had done to one of the files had broken the feeds. Since this was a fairly new install of Serendipity, I decided to delete all the files and do a fresh install.

The fresh install went off without a problem, and all of my entries remained, but still the feeds don't show any posts when I subscribe to them. This leads me to believe that there is something in the database that is causing it for this instance of Serendipity, but not the other, which has its own database. Am I missing something obvious?

The site is at http://thecarnage.geckobrothers.com and the feeds are

http://thecarnage.geckobrothers.com/ind ... index.rss2
http://thecarnage.geckobrothers.com/ind ... index.rss1
http://thecarnage.geckobrothers.com/ind ... ments.rss2
http://thecarnage.geckobrothers.com/ind ... atom10.xml

[garvinhicking]

Hi sparkx!

Your RSS2 feed looks proper! If I subscribe to it using my default RSS Client RSS Bandit, it works as expected.

Maybe the sites you are trying it are caching your feed and you need to wait for some time until they fetch the now working feed(s)?

About the error in your Atom feed: Atom is very picky about XHTML compliance. In one of your entries you made a URL like http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php? ... Itemid=159

However in valid XHTML this needs to be:

Code: Select all

http://www.opensourcecms.com/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=205&Itemid=159

So you'd either need to fix this manually (replace "&" with "&") or you could also install the "Fix common XHTML errors" event plugin, which fixes those things automatically for you!

Best regards,
Garvin

[sparkx]

Thanks Garvin! It must just be something odd with this reader. I just got feedback from a couple readers that it is working for them again too, so that's good.

I didn't know that about the atom feed. I'll keep an eye out for that in the future.

sparkx

[Gamersea]

I have the same sort of issue but on my blog(s) the outside/remote feeds have stopped working.
Could this problem have been made by the same issue of a blank line?

[hyperorbiter]

hi,

my feeds return the following in safari:

"This page contains the following errors:

error on line 1 at column 1: Document is empty
Below is a rendering of the page up to the first error."

www.definitive.co.nz/blog/

any clues?

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Hm, sadl yyour URL seems to be down right now?

Best regards,
Garvin

[hyperorbiter]

hi garvin,

it's intermittent at the isp at the moment, but it's a separate problem...

if you try now you'll see what i mean...

thanks

stu