Why is my Feed blank

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  mnplatypus · Member · Feb 17, 2008 at 10:43 pm

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  I have content at http://zion40.wordpress.com/ but there is no feed at http://zion40.wordpress.com/feed/

  It’s been a couple of days . . . I thought it might come right by itself, but not so far . . .

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  mnplatypus · Member · Feb 17, 2008 at 10:44 pm

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  I guess I should mention that it had been working fine for months

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  trent · Member · Feb 17, 2008 at 10:51 pm

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  It works for me, but there are a few people saying their feed is not showing up, so I am wondering if there was a temporary “glitch” there for a little while.

  Trent

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  applemoosh · Member · Feb 18, 2008 at 12:19 pm

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  Same problem here, I’m trying to get the TUAW feed (http://feeds.tuaw.com/weblogsinc/tuaw) on to my blog, but the RSS widgets says “Error: could not find an RSS or ATOM feed at that URL.”

  Any clues on how to get it to work?

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  raincoaster · Member · Feb 18, 2008 at 12:22 pm

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  Is that a WordPress.com blog feed? If not, the error might be on their end instead.

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  mnplatypus · Member · Feb 18, 2008 at 3:52 pm

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  It’s still not working for me . . .

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  applemoosh · Member · Feb 18, 2008 at 5:56 pm

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  raincoaster, is not a WP.com feed, but I just tried adding the RSS feed from WP.com at http://wordpress.com/feed/ and I get the same error message.

  Seems like the RSS widget is broken. :(

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  mnplatypus · Member · Feb 20, 2008 at 1:18 am

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  Now the feed shows up at http://zion40.wordpress.com/feed/, but when I try to put in in the RSS widget on our main blog I still get “Error: could not find an RSS or ATOM feed at that URL.”

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  mnplatypus · Member · Mar 4, 2008 at 6:20 pm

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  It came back and for a few days all was good . . .

  Now the same thing happened on http://zionbuffalo.wordpress.com . . . the rss feed shows up with google reader, but shows a blank feed at http://zionbuffalo.wordpress.com/feed/, is not updating in pageflakes, and is blank on feedburner. In the RSS widget on zion40.wordpress.com it says “An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.”

  Am I doing something wrong??

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  mnplatypus · Member · Mar 4, 2008 at 6:22 pm

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  oops, comma too close to the address and messing it up. . . the blank feed is at http://zionbuffalo.wordpress.com/feed/

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  mnplatypus · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 3:22 pm

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  This is getting really frustrating. Still nothing at zionbuffalo.wordpress.com/feed/ , like when you click on ‘entries RSS’ on the page (‘comments RSS’ works fine) and no response to my emails to support yesterday or last Thursday . . .

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  raincoaster · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 3:38 pm

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  It works 100% fine for me. Maybe the problem is a caching issue on your end?

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  mnplatypus · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 4:06 pm

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  Ok, after I posted and before you posted it did reappear on the feed page. Feedburner was still blank, and after using their ping tool twice with no results I used their Resync tool and got this message

  There is an issue that must be addressed with your source feed for the feed “Zion Lutheran Church News”

  The URL you entered does not appear to be a valid feed. We encountered the following problem: Your feed has an invalid character(s) in it. This may be caused by editing your posts with a wordprocessing program. Try copying your posts into a plain text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit) before pasting them in your blogging tool.

  So now how do I find which posts and fix them???

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  raincoaster · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 4:12 pm

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  Are you pasting into your blog from Word? If so, stop immediately. You’ve no idea the number of issues it causes. I would suggest working backwards from your most immediate posts and using the Clean Up Code tool on the Advanced toolbar to fix things.

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  ellaella · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 4:16 pm

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  I had this issue once and the problem (according to FeedBurner’s Feed Doctor, which is a handy tool) was an ampersand. I see you’ve got one in a post beginning with the words March 2.

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  ellaella · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 4:17 pm

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  To clarify – an ampersand in a post title in both our cases.

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  mnplatypus · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 4:51 pm

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  Thanks both.

  I am working on removing ampersands from the titles, and using the cleanup tool on all the posts from last week when it quit until today. Figuring out the cleanup tool took some homework . . . I didn’t have the visual editor option switched on so had no idea what the advanced toolbar was or where to find it to start with. Do you think I have to go back further than last week when everything was working?

  I don’t typically paste from word, or even use word much, but occasionally other staff/volunteers will send announcements in a word email attachment, and I had no idea it was a problem until now but will definately remember that in the future!

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  raincoaster · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 5:00 pm

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  You should be fine just going back to before things started messing up. I can’t believe that Feedburner can’t read ampersands! That’s crazy!

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  mnplatypus · Member · Mar 5, 2008 at 5:09 pm

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  Everything is working again . . . I finally found a reference to http://www.feedvalidator.org/ in another post and used that to isolate the problem post. Neither the clean up tool or copying and pasting to and from notepad worked, so I finally just deleted the sentence with the problem and now the entries RSS, feedburner, and pageflakes widget are all working.

  Thanks again for helping me figure this one out :)