Understanding RSS

Until several weeks ago I had not used an RSS reader to access the sites that I like to visit. I'm not sure why other than it seems like the authors of those sites have only in the last year or two added RSS feeds or started their own blogs. As a result, until recently I had not even taken the time to view my own site in an RSS aggregator. I just assumed that the content had to look OK because I used the standard RSS template that ExpressionEngine provides.

Recently I viewed the feed from this site and each post looked like one large block of text as opposed to showing the proper line breaks between paragraphs, code examples, etc. Upon investigation I viewed the feed using Bloglines and Google Reader. Both aggregators confirmed that the feed was coming across in this manner.

ExpressionEngine provides very good support and I was able to quickly find a solution in their Knowledge Base. I changed my template, logged back into Bloglines and Google Reader, and . . . everything looked the same.

To make a long and frustrating story short, I found out the following about RSS and aggregators in general:

• As I made changes to my RSS template I thought those changes would be reflected in the aggregators immediately. However, RSS readers update only periodically and when they do they cache their results. Changes made to an RSS template may not show up in an aggregator for several hours. Furthermore, they may never show up depending on what aggregator you are using.
• Some aggregators, as the ExpressionEngine Knowledge Base article alluded to, do not show HTML as expected. Bloglines appears to be one of those aggregators. For that reason and although I don't really care for the interface, I've moved to Google Reader as my aggregator of choice.

In summary, I find it hard to believe that given the popularity of Bloglines it does not show whitespace as expected. And not understanding how aggregators cache their results resulted in several hours over several days of research and frustration on my part.