China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Validating RSS-feeds can be quite difficult, espacially if you have a website with user generated content and people use some strange characters in their own language, for example “ä” (ä) . If this HTML-entity is saved like this : “ä” in your database you have  a problem because  XML only has 5 predefined entities.

If your document is read by an XML parser that does not or cannot read external entities, then only the five built-in XML character entities  can safely be used.To get your RSS-feed valid, you need to write a function to encode and decode and I found a nice one here:

http://www.sourcerally.net/Scripts/39-Convert-HTML-Entities-to-XML-Entities.

Recently there were some updates on the agenda: typo3 has a new version with a lot of improved features, phpBB3 had to be updated, dolphin and of course wordpress. The wordpress update is finished now and I have to admit that it will take some time to get used to the new backend. But in general it feels looks like a big improvement.

Typo3 is a bit annoying because you often have to update the extensions and sometimes change the extension-templates after updates. Fortunatly we did not too many changes in the source-code.