Fixing a WordPress RSS feed

rss feed

I had the extreme joy of discovering my RSS feed was broken earlier. While trying to fix something else, I stumbled upon Is My Blog Working? and ran my site through it. “My RSS feed doesn’t work? I have an RSS feed? HEY!!!” So I started trying to figure out how to fix it.

Amazingly, google was not of extreme help. Usually, the first hit is a solution to my WordPress problem of the day. Not today. I found a forum thread indicating that blank spaces at the ends of various .php files were to blame for the broken feed, especially the functions.php file. While it is worth a check, this didn’t help me. I went through EVERY .php that makes up this blog theme (thankfully not very many) and killed a few blank lines at the ends of files, but that didn’t help. Still broken.

I then discovered Feed Validator and got another clue. It too claimed my feed was broken, but I noticed something that I’d not noticed in the firefox view-feed-source that I quickly closed in disgust: there were wp-cache tags at the end! This sparked a little inspiration and I went straight to the WP-cache settings.

wp-cache settings

A quick scan of the cache and sure enough, my RSS feed was in there. I put it on the exclude list, flushed the cache, and reloaded. BOOM! Instantly working RSS feed. Not that I have an insanely popular blog anyway, but I doubt that keeping my feed from being cached will really kill my bandwidth or server, so out it goes. And since I was unable to find a single solution to this problem that involved tweaking the WP-cache plugin, I’m making this blog post. Hope it helps someone.

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