My Broken RSS-Feed

At the beginning of the year, I wrote about switching from Feedly to Feedbin. I am still very happy with Feedbin and have subscribed to numerous blogs and other sites there — including my own.

A few days ago, something caught my eye: I had published a new post but hadn't seen it in Feedbin at all. Strange. Maybe I just overlooked it? That's easy to check. In the list of all subscriptions, I searched for my name and looked at the details of my feed:

Unlike what is shown in the screenshot here, it said that my last update in the feed was two years ago. Either time has flown by or something wasn't right with my feed.

The W3C Validator showed everything was fine, no errors, just a few warnings about relative anchor links. I also use a free service that informs me by email if my feed is broken (I just can't remember the name right now).

I decided to use a small feature I'm not supposed to talk about. I published a blog post, but only showed it in the RSS feed. There I wrote about my problems and asked for comments.
I felt very clever because only subscribers to my RSS feed can see and comment on this post. Whoever comments therefore clearly subscribed to my feed.

It was commented on diligently! My feed was therefore readable, and many of the comments confirmed this to me. That helped me a lot, thanks to everyone who reached out!
Something must have bothered Feedbin about my feed. I checked the XML again in detail. Everything looked okay; tags with dates were set, the date in the right format, etc. Everything looked good. But something must have distinguished my feed from others!

After a little thought, I suspected that a specific line might be to blame: my stylesheet.

When you call up an RSS feed in the browser, it is either downloaded directly or you see the source code, which doesn't tell you much. However, there is the possibility (as with HTML) to embed styles so that the feed is also readable for humans in the browser. I did that.

I took the styling out, pushed the changes to the server, and re-subscribed to my feed. Since then, posts are coming in again. It was actually the styling.

That's a bit annoying, but not the end of the world. I also didn't have the opportunity to figure out if it was due to my specific code or if Feedbin can't handle styles at all. Maybe I'll test that again later, but right now, there are more important tasks.

Thanks to my great feed readers, I now have an RSS feed that works everywhere. Thank you very much. And perhaps you also want to check your feeds; it would be annoying if it failed at something so small.

By the way, you can now also see which feeds I subscribe to in my Blogroll!