A client recently sent me an email asking why her RSS feed suddenly looked different. Previously her feed had displayed several buttons at the top which linked to different services she could use to monitor her feed. Now she was just seeing a drop-down box for a few services and wanted to know what the problem was.
This is a question I get from clients a lot, and the solution is one of my favorites because it doesn’t require any work on my part. All you need to do is look at your feed in a different browser. As you can see from the screenshot below, different browsers display your feed in different ways.
The feed itself is an XML file which looks something like this when you view it in a text editor and NOT a web browser:
This plain text file is pretty incomprehensible to most web users. The programmers of your browser know that, so they decided to hide the naked text and dress up the feed a bit so you can better understand it. So fear not! Your feed is fine. It’s your browser that needs adjustment.
