johnaugust

For me, this is what worked.

Deactivated all plugins.
Checked that the feed validated. It did.

Reactivated plugins one-at-a-time, until the feed wouldn’t validate.
Checked that last plug-in for extra lines, and sure enough, there they were.

It’s clearly the dreaded blank line XML problem, but it’s frustrating since the only files that changed were the official WP ones.

I’m having the same issue since upgrading to 2.6.2.

https://johnaugust.com/feed

and

https://johnaugust.com/comments/feed

both come back with: Blank line before XML declaration.

The main feed also has another error, which I’m trying to track down.

You almost certainly were hacked. You really do have 2.5.1, but the remnants of the hack are causing it to show as 2.5.

Relevant article is here:

https://wordpressphilippines.org/blog/has-your-wordpress-been-hacked-recently/

Check further in the forums for other troubles like this.

Just a bump to say that I was having exactly this problem, until I found this post (by doing a Google search on “‘cat_ID int(4) NOT NULL auto_increment,cat_name` varchar(55 “)

The trick was to cut-and-paste the SQL export (minus the first line, which was trying to create a new database).

Thanks for all your suggestions.
I’ve backed up all my WP files, along with the database and related images, just in case. I’m leery to install a nightly while away on vacation, since half an hour at an internet cafe doesn’t bode well for smooth installation.
I’ll certainly keep recommendations about hosting providers under consideration. Once I get a chance to look at the real logs, I’ll hopefully have a better sense of what’s actually been happening, and whether another provider could/would/should have done a better job working through it.
I know that Lunarpages has upgraded to the latest PHP/Zend (after the problems began, so that’s not the cause).

Thanks for your feedback so far.
My situation does seem similar to that of NuclearMoose, in that the folks at Lunarpages (the webhosting company) can’t seem to tell me much other than that I’m suddenly using up way too much of the CPU. They’ve been varying degrees of helpful. I understand that at $7.95 a month, they can’t afford to spend hours playing cyber CSI. Ironically, it was Lunarpages that brought me to WordPress; my site was originally Movable Type, but they banned MT for being a resource hog.
Checking the logs was my first instinct, but that’s been a challenge because they moved me to a non-production server, so the logs for the past few days show blank. I’ve asked them to give me access. The christmas holiday has made everything slower. I’ll post what I get when I get it.
One of the last entries in the server log before they moved my site was the Googlebot, which led me to think our happy spider had gotten lost and panicked. Based on suggestions in the forums, I added
noindex,follow
to index pages (as you can see in the source). Lunarpages reported that the CPU load had dropped, so I assumed everything was fine. But then the numbers spiked again.
My install of WP is pretty standard (for an alpha-2). The only real coding I’ve done is for the comment spam protection, which should only kick in when someone tries to post a comment. (And thus, should not running some sort of infinite loop.) But if anyone smarter than me (not hard) wants to take a look at the coding behind it, you can see it at:
https://internetalchemy.org/2004/09/zero-comment-spam
I haven’t had a single piece of comment spam since I implemented it weeks ago. But if it’s causing the problem — or inspiring some hacker to try to break it — I’d sure like to know.
Thoughts? Suggestions?