FeedBurner Headline Animator Problems

Many a blog post out of frustration is born.

I recently pulled out most of my hair while attempting to discern why our FeedBurner email signature (created with the Headline Animator) was broken.

Here’s the quick story, and the solution.

The Headline Animator Problem

Normally, you can create an email signature with the Headline Animator that will scroll through your latest five posts:

I had created this a few months ago, and it worked fine.

This week I tried to implement it in our company’s email. I got this message, “Watch this space for future items!”

So, I did what any other lazy tech-type would do: I ignored the problem and tried to create a new Headline Animator. I went through the motions and hit Save. Here is what I saw next:

Also being a user experience enthusiast, I laughed out loud. Very insightful messaging!

I also tried to delete the current Headline Animator, and that did not work.

Due to this turn of events, I theorized that FeedBurner’s Headline Animator functionality must be broken.

I started searching, searching, searching….

The Solution…Eventually

I read many different posts and forums and found that this problem was fairly common, but I did not find any answers. I posted a topic in the FeedBurner Google Group, but then saw that virtually every post had received no reply. I have experienced this in other Google Groups as well. I’m now wondering what good Google Groups are. I mean, shouldn’t a moderator attempt to answer some questions every once in a while? I digress.

I did see a reply to a blog post suggesting that the person try validating their feed. I had validated our feed in the past. I decided to try and validate the actual Burned feed (the feed through FeedBurner). It validated just fine.

I then decided to again validate our feed directly: http://closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/feed/atom.

It did not pass.

There are usually some warnings, but this time it failed. The reason it gave was that our feed contained some ‘funky’ characters (I paraphrase), possibly high-bit characters.

FeedValidator is actually pretty awesome. It tells you exactly where the problems are. It tole me our feed had three suspect characters.

We recently ported over to a new server, and while rebuilding the database, many characters did not translate correctly, such as en dashes, em dashes, quotes, etc. I thought I had caught all of them, but as it turns out these three still existed in one post by Amy Greer: å, ø , and Ø.

I substituted the ? (that was now showing up where the characters had been before the server transfer) with html special characters and voila, problem solved.

Final Thoughts

I can understand why the product produced by Headline Animator would not work in this case. But, should the actual Headline Animator admin interface get broken by this, not allowing you to create or delete? At the very least should not a useful error message be displayed?

I hope the special characters I used in this post don’t break it again….

View related topics: atom, feeds, rss