The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

Late night bughunting

Posted on November 11, 2005.

Last night, while checking my website with Firefox 1.5 RC2, I discovered that my feeds were broken. There was a space inserted before the XML declaration that broke the validation and prevent Firefox from being able to parse it correctly. It was 6 in the morning but I had to fix it.

I searched the Wordpress Codex and found lots of information. At first I thought I might need to update Wordpress but that wasn't the case; I have the latest version. I then thought one of the files might be inserting the character. I kept replacing files on this server with files from another Wordpress install that didn't have broken feeds, but that didn't fix anything. With the advice of this discussion, I figured the problem must be one of the plugins.

I went through all the plugins and deleted any extra lines after the ?> at the end. Still nothing. The sun was coming up outside my window but I figured I was too close to just stop. I then went through the process of deactivating plugins one by one and seeing when the problem stopped. After the last one the feed started working again. I figured I had really solved it and checked the file. There wasn't anything to change, though, and when I activated the last plugin again, it was still working. I thought something must be wrong, if I didn't change anything but it suddenly started working again. After a few more refreshes, the problem came back. How confusing.

I then realized that my browser was caching the feed and that my testing was for nothing. I started the same testing all over and this time cleared my cache between each update. This did it; after deactivating the Run PHP plugin the feed worked again. I opened the file and found a single space at the end of the file. Not a new line, just a single orphan space. How careless. 7:30 am: bughunt complete.

So now the feeds work fine, and you shouldn't see any problems if you import them into a feedreader or view them in your browser. Enjoy!

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