I was just informed by edd that my post about my intended NMUs causes crashes with a couple of RSS readers.

A bit of investigation and running rss validators revealed the following:

My RSS feed was okay. The bug is triggered by the following coincidences:

  • My blog posting title contained an ampersand, correctly encoded as ANDamp;.
  • PlanetDebian loaded the blog entry, decoded the ampersand, but did not reencode it again in their rss feed
  • the used rss readers crashed upon the ampersand without a proper entity following. (they should be more fault-tolerant, i think an entity name must never start with whitespace, so the parser should have been able to recover gracefully)

Well, until this is fixed, please no not use ampersands in your blog posting titles. I don’t know about the bodies, i decided to avoid them there, too, for now.