The message “The XML page cannot be displayed. Cannot view XML input using XSL style sheet. Please correct the error and then click the Refresh button, or try again later.” was displayed instead. The feed did however work fine in other web browsers that we tested immediately including Mozilla Firefox.

This led to the conclusion that the error had to be Internet Explorer specific. It could have been a plugin that was running on the website itself, some incompatible code in the theme that was causing Internet Explorer 8 to throw that error message or a problem at the hoster of the feed Feedburner.

The first thing that came to my mind was to validate the feed using an official resource like the Feed Validation Service at W3C. This service validates a feed and displays validation errors and warnings including their location in the code. One error was displayed: Your feed is not well formed according to the XML specification

It turned out that one of the articles published lately contained the char & which was responsible for the feed validation error and the error in Internet Explorer 8.

Escaping that character with & a m p ; (remove the spaces) was the solution that fixed the error. The feed did validate correctly afterwards (after the new article had been cached by the feed hosting service) and Internet Explorer 8 was displaying the feed correctly.

This does mean however that webmasters have to always escape certain characters in the articles that they publish on their websites if they want their feed to be working in Internet Explorer 8.

This is actually not the fault of Internet Explorer 8. The web browser is strictly following the rules in this case. It’s time to look for a plugin that will automatically escape those chars so that the feed will validate and display correctly in Internet Explorer 8.

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I figured it out by myself just a few minutes ago. Here is what I did. My Feedburner feed was being transferred from Feedburner to Google and I had to change a cname entry to reflect that change. Everyone knows that changes to the DNS can take up to 48 hours and I first thought that this was the issue.

Other webmasters on various forums reported similar problems, especially those dreaded 404 not found problem. Once the 404 went away I encountered the main problem. The feed was not showing up. When I opened it in the browser it would simply show the Ghacks homepage.

Google support told me to change the url in the Feedsmith Wordpress plugin to the new feedproxy url which I did. This did not turn out to fix the initial problem though.

I opened http://feedburner.google.com/, went to the Troubleshootize tab and tried to Resync my feed. Thought that this could be the problem. The resync basically told me that it could not find a feed and that I should check the original feed url at Feedvalidator.

I checked it there and it told me that this was not a valid RSS News Feed. The old url which was entered in Feedburner from day 1 was http://www.ghacks.net/?feed=rss2. You can check that for yourself if you click on the Edit Feed Details tab.

I changed the feed to http://www.ghacks.net/feed which turned out to be a valid feed. The last step was to enter that feed url into the Original Feed option at the Google Feedburner site. I tried to sync the feed and that worked as well. I went to Google Reader and updated my feed and wham, there were all my missing posts.

If you have a similar problem I suggest you check out if your feed in Feedburner ends with ?feed=rss2 or something similar. Check that at Feedvalidator and try other feed urls if the first comes up as no valid RSS News Feed.

Please let me know if you can access my feed properly now. I would also like to hear from other webmasters with the problem.

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That phase won’t normally last longer than 24 hours. The old feed address is automatically redirected to the new one but since I have been using feed branding at Feedburner I had to update a cname in the domain configuration to point to a new url.

I got one email so far from a user who told me that my feed was not showing up anymore and that he was receiving a 404 (not found) instead. Please let me know if you are also experiencing those difficulties. It helps if you mention the service or program that you are using to read my feed.

Update: Feed should be working now for everyone.

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I went to Feedburner which tracks the Ghacks feed and displays the amount of subscribers and which services they use to read my feed. Last Friday was the last normal day with 588 readers who have been using Netvibes to read my feed. Then on Saturday that figure took a first dive to 410 readers and to 1 on Sunday. Monday continued that trend with another single Netvibes reader on that day and I’m waiting for today’s statistics to see if they have changed.

This time however the issue is not with Feedburner but with Netvibes. They are currently – or have – migrated their system to new servers and a blog post by Tariq Krim at Netvibes sheds some light into the darkness:

During the upgrade, you may encounter feedburner stats issues, but everything should be fixed shortly when the migration is completed.

So, Netvibes stats have not been reported correctly to Feedburner during the last three days and the cause for this has been the Netvibes server migration.

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Feed Analysis is a online script that analyzes Feedburner feeds. Feedburner is without doubt the most popular service that provides feeds and many tools and add-ons for them. Most of the blogs that I read regularly use Feedburner. The interesting aspect is that you only enter the url of the feed and get detailed information about it. You can select a period of time that you want information for which ranges from 3 months to 50 months.

The feed will be processed and three charts generated that display various information about the feed. Those are named Numbers of Subscribers per Month, Number of Subscribers, Hits, Views and Clicks Monthly & Number of Subscribers on each Week Days. Below are the charts that are produced after analysing the Ghacks feed.

Each chart contains several interesting information for webmasters and other interested users. You can see the monthly growth, see how many new subscribers have joined in a particular month, get information about subscribers & hits and see which day is the best and worst of the week. Some are only available if the blog uses Feedburner Pro.

What I really like are the projections and averages that are displayed. Feed Analysis calculates the gain in subscribers in the next three, six and twelve months. According to the predictions I hit 10K subscribers in less than three months and a whooping 25K in 12 months. The estimated banner ads and blog values displayed are just that, estimates that can’t be right because they only take the feed into consideration.

Those information can be quite valuable if you intend to purchase a blog to verify the feed count for instance.

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One of my goals for 2008 is to reach 10000 RSS readers by years end which would mean a doubling of last years subscriber rate. So, its only 3931 to go until I reach that goal. The numbers go down and up all the time though but a general upward trend is clearly visible.

It took roughly one year to double the RSS readers from 3000 to 6000. Oh, that sharp rise in March 2007 was due to the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin which routes all RSS feeds through Feedburner. Before that only Feedburner stats were counted.

Take a look at the Feedburner stats to see what I mean.

Thanks guys, you are wonderful. If you have not subscribed to my RSS feed yet you can do so by clicking on the RSS icon in the sidebar on the right.

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Essentially, every link in my feed that pointed to my blog was a Feedburner redirect in the form of http://feeds.ghacks.net/~r/Ghacksnet/~3/172961335/ which did not look that nicely. I did find out that it had something to do with tracking the clicks of the subscribers to be able to compile better statistics. This is something that I did not need and I decided to take a look and see if it was possible to disable the redirect.

It took a while until I found the setting that was responsible for this behavior. If you want to disable it you have to go into the Analyze tab of your feedburner account, click on the ‘Dare to be different?’ link under Site Stats and uncheck ‘Item Link Clicks’ there.

The redirection links will disappear immediately afterwards.

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