Today in the morning I noticed that my blog is giving error on feeds page, and after searching and googling here and there could not find a straight solution to it.

Like mine if anyone is getting such a error on there wordpress blog.

XML Parsing Error: xml declaration not at start of external entity … Line Number 2, Column 1:<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

Here are some of the steps to remove the error:-

1. Check your wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php files for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
2. Check your wp-config.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
3. Check your theme’s functions.php file for blank lines outside of <? and ?> bracketed sections.
4. One by one, disable plugins and revalidate until you isolate the one causing the problem.

And after all the above steps if your still not able to fix the issue try updating your wordpress blog, to the latest version(2.8.3), I just upgraded it and it worked for me.

Hopefully this post would be helpfull for those how are really struggling with the XML Parsing issue.

Just to share something new and nice for those who don’t want to waste their time on all the above steps. I have found a new plugin Fix rss feed which claims to solve all the RSS related issue by itself just by installing them on Wordpress blog.