Random website issues

[curttasker]

• http://anathema.github.com - The rss and atom links are both nonfunctional.
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/anathema/ - The google+ and facebook links bring up a login popup, but do nothing after that. The twitter popup works fine.

[UrsKR]

That's strange. I get RSS/Atom from them 6 hours later. How about you? I don't think we can do anything about the buttons on the sf.net page, they are generated by sf.net.

[curttasker]

After some double checking, most browsers (safari, firefox) and a few RSS readers I tried were able to render the feed fine. Google Chrome, however, threw me a giant error screen on both, with this error message:

error on line 73 at column 14: Encoding error

Here's the relevant section. Line 73 is the first <title> tag. It looks like the title isn't closed, and there is no link, pubdate, author, guid, description, it just closes out the item tag. That apepears to be whats' causing the issue.

    <item>
      <title>Anathema 3.1.0 - Plus ll release an updated version.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;I am sorry for the inconvenience and apologize for the delay in notification - 
a long-lasting server downtime shut us off.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>

    <item>
      <title>Fixing...</title>
      <link>http://anathema.github.com/2007/02/11/Fixing.html</link>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0800</pubDate>
      <author>Urs</author>
      <guid>http://anathema.github.com/2007/02/11/Fixing</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;At long last, I am proud to present the new version of Anathema, featuring absolutely no &quot;one big thing&quot;.
Instead, there's a plethora of updates and fixes and niceties for you to enjoy, many of which owe their existence to Ricardo, Democritus or Jontu.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;The changelog is available right next to the &lt;a href='/downloads.html'&gt;download&lt;/a&gt;, so head there right away and check back here in two weeks, when I hope to have a smaller update for this version ready.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>

    <item>
      <title>Windows on your Lap</title>
      <link>http://anathema.github.com/2006/12/15/WindowsOnYourLap.html</link>
      <pubDate>Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:00:00 -0800</pubDate>
      <author>Urs</author>
      <guid>http://anathema.github.com/2006/12/15/WindowsOnYourLap</guid>
      <description>&lt;p&gt;As of now, Anathema sports a convenient installer for Windows.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Originally requested - and advanced - by Jontu Kontar, it took a hiatus,
saw a complete revision and now finally is finished with all the features we originally imagined.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Get it via the &lt;a href='/downloads.html'&gt;Downloads&lt;/a&gt; section.&lt;/p&gt;</description>
    </item>

[UrsKR]

Hmm, strange. On my system, they show perfectly well - on Google Chrome as well as in Google Reader.

The post you mentioned has an 'c' with accent ceddille (ç) on the character where the error appears to be: You quote <title>Anathema 3.1.0 - Plus ll release an updated version.&lt;/p&gt;, but it should read <title>Anathema 3.1.0 - Plus ça change. Could that cause the issue?

[curttasker]

The main things I noticed were the lack of the closing </title> tag and the lack of the opening <description> tag.

Looking closer though, you're right, the ç is the issue. The html for the news page containing the ç, http://anathema.github.com/2012/03/04/Version3.1.0.html, has the encoding charset=iso-8859-1, and works properly.

Popping the feed into a few validators shows that its coming down as UTF8 for both atom and rss (in fact both those feeds are identical, only the filename of the feed is different). UTF8 supports this character fine, so I'm not sure what's going on there.

w3 validator validome - atom validation validome - rss validator

The best I can say without looking at the code is that whatever's generating the feed isn't properly encoding the characters for UTF8. Changing the charset over to iso-8859-1 would fix the validation pretty easily, and fixing it for utf8 could involve simply passing the data through a utf8_encode function to properly clean it out.

In any case, this issue only appears to happen to me on chrome (both windows and mac, dev and live builds), and nowhere else. Its technically being correct in complaining about an invalid feed, but since the feed works fine in almsot every RSS reader, it shouldn't be an issue for us leaving it as-is. It just threw me off getting a giant error screen clicking on the rss links.

[UrsKR]

I could reproduce the issue on my home system in chrome, and have added the encoding information to the feed. One CTRL-F5 later, they look good. By the way, if you ever again have issues with the website, you can send pull requests to the repo next door