Currently, I have four RSS and Atom feeds set up for this site:

• An RSS 2.0 feed for general use.
• An Atom 1.0 feed for general use.
• An RSS 0.9 feed for LiveJournal.com.
• An Atom 1.0 feed for comments (mostly so I can see all the comments in Bloglines).

For some reason, the RSS 2.0 feed wasn’t updating properly. I noticed because Bloglines wasn’t showing any of my posts for today. When I opened the feed in IE7, it kept giving me an error. It took me a few minutes to notice the More Information link on the error page that actually showed what was wrong. It was having trouble with some of the characters in the feed.

I’ve been using Word to type my longer posts, so I thought I’d go fix those characters, like the single quote, that were giving it problems by using Notepad. After fixing a couple of posts that way, I started to look at the other feeds that were working.

Apparently, the default feed in GeekLog, which I’ve only slightly modified, is set to UTF-8 (Unicode) encoding. When you add a new feed, it defaults to ISO-8859-1, which is the standard we’ve had for years. It was the encoding for the higher characters (anything above standard ASCII) that was giving it trouble. It worries me that it was working before, but I’ve got it switched to ISO-8859-1 and it’s working fine.