Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 15 years and 1 month old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

A few days ago someone pointed out to me that the RSS feed of my blog was empty, throwing an error:

XML Parsing Error: no element found
Location: https://www.windracer.net/blog/atom.xml
Line Number 1, Column 1:

I checked the atom.xml file on my server (I host this blog myself, not on Google’s servers) and found that it was zero bytes (rss.xml was also empty). So basically, the feed was empty. My posts were still making it to my site (i.e., the index.html file) but the feed files were just blank. I tried republishing over and over and the files always came across empty.

So I started this thread over on the Blogger help forums and discovered that I wasn’t alone and quite a few other people were having the same problem. It seems to only be affecting people who use FTP (or sFTP, in my case) publishing. This has got to be a problem on Blogger’s side, but they’ve been conspicuously absent … not a single reply (unless you count this guy). There are lot of new threads in the help group now with the same problem, so maybe this will get some visibility with Blogger soon.

Back in December Blogger had strange java/FTP issues that completely prevented people from posting to their blogs. It took days to resolve. So far this feed issue has been going on for at least three days. Since I already host the blog on my server, maybe I should bit the bullet look into running my own blogging software as well. I’ve been using Blogger for a long time (since 2002) but it might be time to take a good look at something like WordPress or Movable Type.