Update: Of course, my feed doesn’t validate either. Two of the three problems are simple fixes, the third will take a little massaging to get right.
I’ve corresponded privately with a few folks whose feeds break in my aggregator (I use NewsGator) — and this is a huge problem. Surprisingly, many of the commercial blogging apps generate invalid feeds out of the box — and most users have no clue what to do about it (indeed, they rarely know there’s a problem). Step one: subscribe to your own feed. Step two: throw your feed through the Feed Validator to see if anything stands out. If there are problems, you could very well be making it harder (if not impossible) for others to read your site.
This was a very annoying aspect of Movable Type. Even the more 3.x version had imperfect feeds, and there isn't a good set of descriptions of all the options for Atom and RSS feeds. (Like, what is the tag for a link to the comments of an entry?) At least they can be customized.
ReplyDeleteI suspect the same problem exists for users of WordPress, since that was one of the bigger offenders.
I've also noticed that some feeds don't validate if there is odd markup in the body of the posting.
I moved away from SharpReader because it was having too many problems with feeds that were somewhat broken. In Newsgator, there was a way to have it be less sensitive to some of the brokenness: http://newsgator.mykbpro.com/Article_6E834.aspx.