I have been hearing now for several weeks people in WP community bitching about the Feed Validator. Partly because a large percentage of the WP blogs out there have had according to “Feed Validator” invalid feeds. What puzzles me is that I have been running the same exact RSS template for about a year and guess what. Each time I have checked it’s Valid, Valid, Valid, Valid! Now there have been an occasion when I tried to do something in a post that caused the feed to not validate but it was my own doing.
Now I am sure some of you don’t care if your feed is valid or not, but I have found that generally when a feed is invalid that, this will typically result in a drop in listener and user site impressions. As there are feed aggregation programs and sites out there that still have trouble with malformed RSS.
I will agree with Matt in saying that there is something to say though about Sam Ruby running the RSS feed validator, because he is about as anti RSS as you can get. [photomatt.net]