rbelden

I seem to have a slightly different version of this problem than I’ve seen described so far, here or elsewhere. I’m getting the same error on both of my RSS feeds (https://rickbelden.com/blog/feed and https://rickbelden.com/blog/comments/feed). Here’s the error msg for the posts RSS:

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity
Location: https://rickbelden.com/blog/feed/
Line Number 2, Column 1:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
^

What’s different, I think, in my case is that the error comes and goes. I don’t get it consistently and I haven’t been able to discern a pattern. I see it more often from the comments feed than from the posts feed. Sometimes I get a clean validation at Feed Validator and sometimes I don’t. Right now I’m getting the error when I click the RSS link at the top of my blog but Feed Validator is telling me in the adjacent browser tab that “This is a valid RSS feed.”

Has anyone else seen this sporadic behavior with the error message above coming and going at apparently random intervals? I’ve taken the suggested path and removed trailing blank and empty lines from the usual suspect files per https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/error/WPBlankLine.html but so far I see no change in the problem behavior. The fact that it is sporadic means it’s impossible to reproduce reliably and therefore testing possible fixes is very difficult.

Any suggestions as to what the problem might be or how to diagnose it would be appreciated. I’m tearing my hair out here. I work all day debugging and fixing software problems, and it’s the last thing I need or want to be doing with the little bit of time I have in the evening to write.

My blog address is:
https://blog.rickbelden.com

Thanks.