Have you validated your feed lately? (Reminds me of “Have you hugged your pet lately?”). If you haven’t, you’re not alone. The majority of new bloggers probably don’t even think about it. But if you really want to be sure to get your latest market information out to your subscribers, be sure your feed is valid!
A valid feed means that the code is syntactically correct. If it is even the dumbest RSS aggregators and news readers (I’m referring to software here, not people!) will be able to view your feed. Okay, so what happens if it’s invalid? Well, it depends. Some readers (again the software) are smart enough to figure things out. However, others will show gobbledygook or worse, nothing at all. Do you use the ever popular FeedBurner? Their service will simply stop reading your feed.
Validating your feed
The easiest way to check if your feed is valid is to use a feed validator. Who would’ve guessed? You can go to one of these sites and enter the URL of your feed.
My feed is valid
Great! But don’t think you’re done. With every post your feed may become invalid if you are using some kind of WYSIWYG editor. A common issue is funky tags due to Microsoft Office. You’ve probably seen it. Copy and pasting will result in new tags like:
<o:p>your content</o:p>
No there is no “o” tag in HTML. MS Office apps have a tendency to add their own formatting including non-HTML tags.
My best advice? Learn HTML. My next best advice? Get Blogger for Word
Have you encountered feed validation issues? Comment to share your experiences.
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