RSS feed issue

[sdwellers]

My Wordpress blog RSS feed is not working correctly and I can't figure why. This is the error I am getting in my sidebar where the RSS feed used to work properly.  My Blog is http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/

RSS Error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 274, column 32

Any insight would be appreciated greatly!

Rob

[evolvingSEO]

Hi Rob

I don't currently see the error on that page, and do not see an RSS feed linked in your source code - did something change or can you provide more info? The URL to your RSS feed if possible?

Thanks!

[sdwellers]

Thank you Dan for the response....

This is the error message I am getting when drag my rss widget to my sidebar...

RSS Error: This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: not well-formed (invalid token) at line 274, column 32

Here is my blog address..
http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/

I'm entering my blog address in the widget as
http://www.seadwellers.com/key-largo-diving-blog/feed/

Any help is greatly appreciated. Does your company offer one-time onpage seo service by any chance?

Rob
Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo

[ThompsonPaul]

Ok - wasn't willing to let this go until I could definitively track down the issue. I've never come across this before.

Rob, you've somehow managed to get a Unicode Escape character entered at the beginning of one of your paragraphs in your "Photography Series Part 1 Picking your Camera" post. This character is invisible to the reader, but because it's considered an invalid XML character, your RSS feed (which is just a specifically formatted XML file) is erroring out, as you noted.

To fix this, you're going to have to go back into your WordPress dashboard to edit that post.

Scroll to the second paragraph in the Smart Phone section that begins "You can buy a waterproof housing..."

Place your cursor at the beginning of the word "buy" and then use your backspace key to delete all the way back to the word "plenty" in the paragraph before.

• Then hit the Enter key to create the new paragraph, and retype the words you've deleted in that "You can buy..." sentence.
• Then retype the words into the end of the previous sentence.
• Then, click Update to save the new version of the post.

Believe it or not, that should fix the RSS feed validation problem.

Now, the next issue will be that many places where the RSS is used will cache the feed (i.e. store a copy of it) The only way to bust/refresh that cache will be to publish another post, so the cached version gets updated to show the new post and the fix to the old post.

If you are adding the RSS feed somewhere it hasn't been used before (e.g. to a newly created sidebar widget) it should be pulling the corrected version of the feed and work as expected.

Hope all that makes sense - if not, just holler. Sorry for all the previous confusion as I tried to work out what was actually happening.

Paul

[Ignore the original suggestion below - the fix required more research]

Rob, on your blog post titled Photography Series Part 1, Picking the Right Camera, the first subhead is  "Which Camera is Right for you?  Sea Dwellers Dive Center of Key Largo..."

Try removing the extra space after the question mark and before the words Sea Dwellers.

[EDITED TO ADD: Also remove the exclamation mark from the alt tag (alt="Dive and shoot!") for the associated photo.]

Then you'll have to clear the site's cache if it has one to clear any RSS cache.

Lemme know how you get on.

Paul