GoDaddy Free Hosting and WordPress RSS Feeds

Posted on June 23, 2009 | Category: Informational, Linux, Resources, Reviews, Web Applications, Web Design

GoDaddy is a great domain registrar with cheap hosting. The user interface is, for the most part, intuitive. I am developing a web site for a client at work using a WordPress platform, a moonmoon feed aggregator, and RSS2HTML. The site is for a fairly niche market, so the complexity needed to make the site look simple with minimal user activity is great on my part. The RSS feed is an integral part of the site. It took me two days of hair-pulling annoyance to find out the fine points of GoDaddy free hosting.

The site currently operates with the GoDaddy Linux Free hosting. Free hosting through GoDaddy is slow and agonizing over FTP. The problem that I was having was with the validation of the RSS feeds. Using Feed Validator, I attempted to determine my probelms. Here is the output of my query:

Sorry
This feed does not validate.
line 1, column 1: Blank line before XML declaration [help]    ^
line 66, column 1: XML parsing error: &lt;unknown&gt;:66:1: not well-formed (invalid token) [help]
insert annoying iframe and other tags here!

The Free hosting account incorporates a huge banner at the top of the page. The banner was including all of the above invalid tags into the RSS to make a jumbled mess.

The solution was to upgrade hosting plans to the $4.99/month alternative. I know, it was simple fix. hopefully, this post will save somwone else the agony of defeat!

One Response to “GoDaddy Free Hosting and WordPress RSS Feeds”

kazem Says:
June 27th, 2010 at 12:15 pm
Thanks for the help. That explains our problems. Also, it seems like the free hosting disallows javascript, so that our WordPress admin page is kind of a mess.