Thursday, April 20, 2006

RSS is driving me crazy

This RSS stuff is driving me crazy. I have been struggling to get my last 5 or 6 posts listed on the Blogging Tories aggregator without success. After hours of troubleshooting, I've got my fingers crossed that this one will actually list. Wish me luck.

Apparently, the source of the problem is that my RSS feed on Feedburner has been polluted by extraneous code inserted by Microsoft Word. Typically, I compose my posts in Word and copy the text into Blogger. Posts created this way no longer seem to validate on Feedburner and consequently don't show up in my RSS feed, although I didn't have any problem with this in the past.

You can still use Word to compose your posts in Blogger if you use a special tool called Blogger for Word. This tool strips out the offending XML code as well as illegal characters such as smart quotes. Check it out if you are experiencing similar problems or see wacky text in your RSS feed.

In the meantime, check out a few of my more recent posts which may have escaped your notice. As much as I like to write, it is also nice to have an audience.