jbenni

I was happy to find this fixed in Ticket #4697.

press on!
John

Thanks Otto.

Like I tried to say in the initial problem statement: it’s intermittent and primarily seen with Thunderbird. (I see from stats that you used Firefox 2.0.0, and no one has reported a problem with that.) feedvalidator comments indicate that some RSS readers may strip whitespace at the top of an RSS feed (Firefox could be one that does). So you may have encountered the whitespace and still not have encountered the “invalid feed” error.

What I’m really looking for is a methodology to troubleshoot why the RSS feed varies over time: what you called “the common factor”.

I tried restarting Apache to see if it’s related to the initial run of some code – no luck. I disabled cache to see if that behaves differently – no luck. I pruned blank lines out of some home grown plugins (and checked the others for blank lines) – no luck.

I use wp-cache plugin, which appears to cache RSS feed as well as other pages. Unless I’m mistaken, sometimes the cached results include spurious whitespace and sometimes not. That baffles me completely.

I tried switching cache off (and clearing the cache) but couldn’t determine a pattern. The problem behavior is too rare to see a pattern yet.

Any suggestions about what to ask the user or what “wires to jiggle” to try to reproduce and isolate this behavior? Thanks in advance.

Anyone ever seen “invalid RSS feed” from Thunderbird on another WordPress site?

press on!
John

Okay, here ’tis: feed://blog.jbennison.net/?feed=rss2

I deliberately omitted this from the initial post, because I’m requesting help with a methodology more than direct intervention. But any assistance is welcomed.

press on!
John

There’s a good bit of discussion on character sets, and some documentation about it if you look for it.

The solution for me, having the identical problem, was to comment out two lines in wp-config.php:
# define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8’);
# define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Try that, and good luck!
press on!

The issue is resolved.

I re-restored the DB, corrected a privilege issue in the DB, and then reapplied the admin update. (Then of course I reconstructed the entries and comments since the backup.)

theory for the problem: I had upgraded mySQL, and when I reloaded the database the privileges were out of whack (due to the a change in mySQL). I needed to run the mySQL update utility to fix the privileges BEFORE running the WP admin update. Failure to fixup the privs in mySQL meant that WP didn’t have the authority to create some new tables on update.

Generally I try to avoid changing multiple things at once, but once in a while I get too cocky. Thanks again for help with this issue.

I did make a backup. And happily, I’ve not posted much sinced then. I’ll restore the backup and go through the database update process again.

Candidly, although I eventually followed all the steps in the instructions I probably played a bit fast and loose with the sequencing. A little knowledge <em>is</em> a dangerous thing.

I’m optimistic that loading the backup and re-updating the DB will fix what ails me, and if it does I’ll chalk this experience up to user error. But I’ll wait to mark the issue resolved until I verify the result. Probably tonight.

Thanks for the timely and helpful responses!

Yes, it told me to update, and I did so before encountering this problem.

Since then, I reinstated my old version (which was actually 2.2.1, not 2.1.1 as originally posted). That also indicated that I needed to update my database, and when it did so I lost my categories. At least I’m back on the air for now.

Other ideas?