Feeds that don’t render properly

I’m so behind on my feeds that I spend a major part of today catching up. I was trying to fly through as many feeds as possible and became really frustrated with a few feeds that didn’t display properly in my reader. The problem is that the feed has HTML in it that is not being properly handled. As a result, instead of a nice formatted post you get HTML along with the text or the post. This is horrible and makes the feed not readable. So much so that I’m considering unsubscribing to the offending feeds. Which would be a shame since the feed contain good information. I’ve left a message in the user forums for my aggregator (Rojo) but haven’t gotten a reply yet.

So, I now have a bunch of feeds that are unreadable with no idea if they might be behaving better again. I’m not sure if it is a problem with the feed itself or just my reader. Some of the broken feed are Atom feeds some are RSS 1.0 (RDF), but not all my Atom feed are broken either. It is a very annoying problem. Validating the feeds at Feed Validator yields a message of “This feed is valid, but may cause problems for some users. We recommend fixing these problems.” I’ll admit that Feedburner version of my feed gets these messages, but RSS 0.92 feed from Wordpress is problem-free whereas the RSS 2.0 version is not. The problem seems to be the content:encoded tag which allows you to style the text of your posts using HTML. All of this has me scratching my head and wondering what exactly is the best feed to make available or if I should advertise all of them so that people can choose the one that works best in they’re aggregator.
The lesson for bloggers out there CHECK TO SEE HOW YOUR FEED RENDERS in multiple aggregators and validate your feed because your readers may not be able to read your blog posts. Consider making different versions of your feed available as well. I’m also thinking about taking a look at my log files to see which aggregators readers are most frequently using. I see these practices as akin to testing you web page in multiple browsers. It is good practice and will make users less frustrated.