Darn that pesky euro! RSS feed problem traced to currency character

Well, as soon as we start publicizing our RSS feeds -- and we have one new one just for Betanews Alpha -- we get reports of problems with them. I'm able to corroborate some of what many Firefox users are reporting: With some Firefox installations, our RSS feeds have been coming up blank. Some, though not all.

One thing we noticed: On systems where Firefox is installed along with a separate RSS news reader, our RSS feed pages do not turn up blank in Firefox. In fact, they look fine. On systems where no separate RSS reader is installed, our feed pages do turn up blank.

Our infrastructure man -- or perhaps better put, "InfraMan," Eric Steil -- discovered the problem this afternoon: Believe it or not, it has to do with the character for the euro, the European currency. I won't type that character here because it may cause the problem, up until Eric installs the solution. Believe it or not, for Firefox browsers that rely on Live Bookmarks, the inclusion of the euro character in the page causes the whole feed to come up blank. Anyway, we've tracked down the problem, and we're implementing the fix right away.