Those of you following the FIRST Blogs RSS Feed may have noticed that for the past little while (depending on your RSS reader software) there have been no new blog posts. This was due to some bad RSS created by a mistake in my processing of content before it’s inserted in the feed. The bug’s been around for a long time but didn’t cause problems until a recently approved blog (which apparently has some awful markup) broke things. I’ve fixed the issue; but, you’re likely to see an overwhelming number of blog posts at the moment (sorry about that). In the (hopefully near) future there will be a better way of reading blogs (probably something like a reading list and custom feeds per user).

(more technical details about the problem are after the cut…)

The problem was due to invalid XML entities being included in posts. The solution was to wrap anything that’s come from blogs in <![CDATA[...]]>. More information about that for the curious can be found at w3schools.