In Transit

I just opened the Atom feed for this blog in my browser, and I was surprised to see this error:

“Reference to undeclared namespace prefix: ‘st1’. Error processing resource”

A quick search revealed that this was caused by editing my post in MS Word before pasting in the Blogger compose window.

Word added special XML indicating the country around the word ‘India’ and that caused the problem. See below:

 If you are in <st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place
 st="on"><st1:place><st1:country-region>India and want a copy,
 drop a note in the comments, I will ship you one asap.

I edited the HTML for the post and removed the rogue tags, and my site feed is fine now.

Moral: Just use a simple text editor to edit your posts, or use the blogger editor itself. Never use MS Word – it is too ‘intelligent’ for human beings.