RSS feed works with Feedly, empty elsewhere

Is your site a wordpress.com site? The source of the page looks like it might be. If so, we have nothing to do with that. This forum is for self-hosted sites.
By the way, I looked at the source of your page and clicked the feed link and it showed me the feed, so it’s not empty. (this was all in the browser)

No, my site is self-hosted, but Jetpack integration allows it to be found by WordPress.com users via their Reader interface.

Install and use the Health Check plugin to kill the other plugins temporarily while you are logged in as admin. The changes under Health Check only affect the view as the admin. The rest of your clients see your site as presented.

Test the RSS feed provided at https://www.buzzmo.com/feed/ via the W3 validator. https://validator.w3.org/feed/

If they then validate you can turn one plugin on at a time and re-validate the RSS Feeds until you find the plugin killing your feed.

If the feeds don’t validate with all the plugins shut down then swap out the theme for a default theme like Twenty Seventeen. Some themes can cause RSS some faults. You can change themes via the Health Check plugin also.

If that still doesn’t work then while all plugins are still off (except Health Check of course) then go into DashBoard –> Settings –> Reading and set the number of syndication posts in a feed to 1 temporarily.

That should give you a feed that validates then as the first error shows up further down the list and the plugins are off and the theme is still a default theme. At this point increase the number by one or two and retest. If they pass then increase again… else decrease the count and retest to determine which post is faulty.

It may be an odd character in the title, something in the body or snippet that doesn’t work with the RSS or possibly a format issue.

I’ve had a few where I’ve had a post causing the problem and I’ve set my default posts count to one less than that ‘broken post’ until I was able later to increase the post count back to what I had been running without problems.

I usually run my count at 30 if I’m feeding other sites or plan to.

Feedly isn’t quite as critical of a feed as some feed readers (and validators) are. Of course, you want a validator to be fairly strict. I also suspect Feedly may run a sanitizer in front of the input feed which helps immensely if there’s an issue.

Henko Behrens has written a feed sanitizer. If you can find one running somewhere you can toss your feeds through that to fix most issues. As long as your feed isn’t empty (yours isn’t) and isn’t mortally injured it should sanitize just fine.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by JNashHawkins.

One more thought… Doesn’t Feedly provide a RSS or Atom feed of whatever it sees input to it? If it does you might just pass that through to whoever needs it. In the case of Jetpack, they may need to use the main feed as produced by the WordPress core to avoid injections of faulty feeds.

I’ve never looked but I believe some of the Feed providers have a plugin to point (redirect) your WordPress feeds to what they provide.

Else there’s probably a way to ‘munge’ the settings to modify that someway.

Thanks for the advice, @jnashhawkins. I managed to track down the culprit. Most of my site’s content was imported, and it looks like some posts had actual CDATA tags in the Excerpt field, which was crapping up the feed XML. I’ve since fixed and my feed validates.