RSS Feed Not Working

I ran your site’s feed through the W3 validator and there were three problems. The most critical is an image URL coming off of Jetpack’s Photon service so If you’ll go into Jetpack and kill Photon (or whatever they call it today) I imagine that will make your RSS feed viable again.

https://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcoldcoffeeblessings.com%2Ffeed%2F

If that doesn’t fix the problem then either the other two problems are choking whatever feed reader you’re using or you’ll need to edit that post that has the flaky image URL.

Alternatively, you can pass that feed URL through Heiko Behrens’ feed sanitizer if you need to… https://feedcleaner.nick.pro/sanitize?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcoldcoffeeblessings.com%2Ffeed%2F&format=rss

• This reply was modified 5 years, 2 months ago by JNashHawkins.

Thanks @jnashhawkins!

I turned off Jetpack’s ‘Site Accelerator (formerly photon). Did not fix the /feed.

I entered the https://www.coldcoffeeblessings.com/feed into the feed cleaner, and though it said it was fixed, the /feed page still is broken.

How do I know which post has the flaky image URL? Sorry, I’m very code illiterate. Thanks for helping!!!

I fed your site’s feed into my RSS reader which crashed on that single feed.

I then fed the same url into the feed sanitizer and replaced the same entry in my reader with the results from the sanitizer. I see three posts now so I’m going to guess you have your feed output set to three.

So the feed works after being sanitized. You do need to use the sanitized output and you can’t easily use that on your website…

I looked at your three entries in your posts and still see the images as being rendered from Photon but I suspected the first reported problem by the validator to begin with…

Take a look at this post from WP Beginner and see if that doesn’t help.

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-wordpress-rss-feed-error

Since the plugins are all turned off now you might take a look at your functions.php file in your theme to make sure that’s not part of the problem. I’d just swap out the current theme temporarily to find out if that’s the problem.

—
Sometimes I have this issue from one of my sites and find reducing the number of items in a feed to just one can help me pinpoint a broken post with an odd character in the text or a weird image that breaks the RSS feed.

Maybe you could go into Dashboard –> Settings –> Reading and set ‘Syndication feeds show the most recent’ to one for a bit.

And test. If it works then it’s the next post or the next after that… try editing out the image temporarily. You can fix it back by using the revisions list in the editor.

—
Hint: Once you get this issue figured out and fixed consider setting the feeds to about 5 more posts than the blog page itself shows. I usually set mine to 25 and 30 respectively.

Keep in mind that WP caches the feed.

@joyously What can I do to see if that’s the issue/clear the feed’s cache?

@jnashhawkins

I separately changed theme, changed syndication to 1, disabled all plugins, and changed the most recent 2 posts to drafts (as that is when the error began once they were published).

Nothing fixes. Do I need to edit the CSS to correct what the feed validator found?
https://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcoldcoffeeblessings.com%2Ffeed%2F

Do I need to clear the cache of this feed somehow?

Thanks for the help and resources.

The theme has nothing to do with the feed, most plugins do not affect the feed, and there should not be CSS in the feed. If you have CSS in the feed, you have a plugin or theme that is interfering where they don’t understand.
You can clear the feed’s “cache” by looking in the database for the transient that stores it, and delete it.

I agree with what @joyously said but then the XML code in the RSS feed seems to say differently.

Looking at what the validator found I am seeing this on line 47 of the raw feed…

line 47, column 2: height must be a positive integer: auto (5 occurrences)

and

line 47, column 2: width must be a positive integer: 100% (5 occurrences)

which looks to be derived from the CSS code That looks like this

img {
    max-width: 100%;
    height: auto;
}

I’d recommend trying the CSS code changed to integers as recommended as neither 100% or auto are integers.

You could nix the featured image also but I’m wondering if that is complete enough on its own.

This may not cure the problem but something is interpreting what appears to be the CSS directives into the rendered XML code.

You might also try adding this to the custom CSS just to try it.

img {
    max-width: 365px;
    height: 365px;
}

I’m still thinking it’s a theme issue or a plugin doing something to the RSS rendering mech. Maybe a function in the theme’s functions.php file even.

Another option might be to look at a ‘FeedBurner’ type service where hopefully the Feed processes the inbound feed a bit and maybe sanitizes things. I’ve never had to do that but I believe there are some plugins to substitute the ‘FeedBurner’ feed for your present feed.

https://feeds.feedburner.com/ColdCoffeeBlessings

There are some promotional benefits to running FeedBurner also from what I’ve heard.

https://codex.www.ads-software.com/Using_FeedBurner

https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/step-by-step-guide-to-setup-feedburner-for-wordpress/

Your feed from your website actually does work with my reader in spite of what the validator says. The FeedBurner feed also works in my reader.

CSS doesn’t belong in a feed. The validator is treating it as XML or HTML (for the post content). That CSS is absolutely the correct CSS to use for images, but it is just out of place in the feed.