Problems with NetNewsWire Lite RSS

February 7, 2003 10:13 AM

Has anyone else noted that as of this morning NetNewsWire Lite (Mac OS X RSS reader) can't parse Metafilter's RSS feed?

Unfortunately all I get from the app is "The XML parser could not parse the RSS data." It worked yesterday, though.
posted by Cerebus to Bugs at 10:13 AM (7 comments total)

well, here's what I see when accessing http://xml.metafilter.com/rss.xml:

"XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://xml.metafilter.com/rss.xml
Line Number 87, Column 17:
----------------^"

Anyone know what's going on here?
posted by 40 Watt at 10:52 AM on February 7, 2003

on closer inspection, there's this at xml.metafilter.com:

XML Parsing Error: not well-formed
Location: http://xml.metafilter.com/
Line Number 35, Column 327:

...and a lot of stuff that the site won't let me post. Looks like the server is burping up Interrobang's comments.
posted by 40 Watt at 11:06 AM on February 7, 2003

Do we need one of these threads every time the feed chokes? The last one was, lemme see, yesterday. It's just an illegal-for-XML character in one of the posts... no need to panic.
posted by Doktor at 11:50 AM on February 7, 2003

NetNewsWire occasionally fails to load MetaFilter's feed for me. I just open the damn site in my browser: if it loads, then there was something icky with the RSS data; if it doesn't, then the server went all flaky again. I don't worry about it.
posted by mcwetboy at 12:13 PM on February 7, 2003

I have worked to escape pretty much every illegal character that people dump on the site, but forgot ampersands. I'll do that today.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 12:25 PM on February 7, 2003

Perhaps it would be easier to simply filter out everything *except* the legal ones?
posted by Cerebus at 8:39 PM on February 7, 2003

Do we need one of these threads every time the feed chokes?

If it's a new bug, yes.

The thread that got bumped off the MeTa main page was the previous RSS bug post. It's no loss, since that thread hasn't seen a new post in two days.
posted by yonderboy at 3:22 PM on February 8, 2003