bmoeskau

Finally resolved this — apparently I got hit by a hack at some point. Noticed a big eval() script stuck in wp_config.php along with a bunch of garbage images in a theme that contained spam links. I’m not sure exactly why, but those links were corrupting my feed in a way that it still validated, but Google and other readers could not process (so I assume they were just using their last good cached copies).

It was confusing because viewing the feed in the browser looked OK, but I finally was able to see the issues by viewing the raw RSS response in the terminal:

curl https://ext.ensible.com/blog/feed

This dumped the feed as HTML (not XML) and the spam links were very evident at the bottom of the output (I’m still not sure how it even validated). The fix was just to go through everything and clean up and delete stuff as needed. Luckily I keep everything in version control so it made it easy to pull the copy from the server and compare locally to see what changed.

Hope this helps someone else.

Thanks, but as I mentioned, the raw RSS is not the issue — it works for me too. The issue is that the version that shows up in all RSS readers for me is an old, invalid feed. What do you see if you subscribe to that feed in Google Reader or Bloglines (the most recent post for me is “Sourc{ 2012 Conference” and the kitten post does not show)?

I also tried adding my feed to FeedBurner and it identifies both the posts feed and comments feed and asks me to choose which one to add, then just gets stuck on that step and never completes. This is quite bizarre.