XML Is A Fickle Beast

I was curious as to why my two most recent blog posts had not shown up on the MXNA feed, so I just took a look at the RSS XML for my blog using FireFox.

Unfortunately, these days Firefox never exposes the raw XML: it formats it into a more "user-friendly" view. So I didn't see any error, but the essentially blank page was enough of a confirmation that there was a problem.

I wasn't sure if IE does the same thing with XML these days, so I fired up Opera. I've never used Opera to troubleshoot XML problems, and was presently surprised at how it output the XML as text and highlighted the first invalid character.

It turned out that I had two invalid characters in one of my posts, and it know why: I copied and pasted some of the text from a Word document and never cleaned it up. What I find really strange about it is that particular post was almost a month old, and I know I've had other posts processed by MXMA since then, so why did it become a problem today? Interesting.

But at least it's fixed.

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BlogCFC was created by Raymond Camden. This blog is running version 5.1.004.