@manton Is there a chance that the xmlrpc api strips out whitespace? I get weird behavior in mars edit for a couple of weeks, where I write a post, reload my blog in Mars Edit and the post comes back with newlines stripped. However the post still has all of them in the web ui and on the blog itself.
@petebrown @matti Thanks for letting me know. I hadn’t noticed but sounds like a bug, will look into it. Using Markdown/HTML or rich text in MarsEdit?
@petebrown @matti Hey folks - @manton and I took a deep dive on this today and after scratching our heads a long time finally discovered the likely root of the problem: unexpected invisible/illegal characters somewhere in the feed. I finally found an example of one in my own posts. It causes my XML parser to fail, but it tries its best to recover, and in the process loses the formatting.
@danielpunkass @manton Thanks for the follow-up, guys! To be clear, I don’t find this to be a common or serious problem 😁
@petebrown @matti I'm going to look into whether MarsEdit can try to recover more gracefully in this situation. If you wanted to confirm this is the issue, you could set the "Number of Posts to Download" in MarsEdit's blog settings to some smaller number until the bug goes away.
@danielpunkass @petebrown @manton Thanks for your hard work! I'll try to find the offending post. Will there be a fix/workaround for this? Even a warning "The post with id 123 includes illegal characters which might interfere with mars edit…" would help a lot.
@matti I think Micro.blog should probably strip out the illegal characters. Looking into making that change.
@manton @danielpunkass Do we know what characters lead to a problem? I could go through the Mars Edit Network Log, maybe to find the offending post?
@danielpunkass @manton Hm. Two observations about your idea to limit the "Number of Posts to Download":
It seems that the difference between loading 59 and 60 posts is two!
I imagine that this is part of the problem with xml parsing failing.
For me it seems to happen when one of these two posts are loaded:
But I can't seem to find any illegal characters in those posts.
@matti Yeah, I noticed the bug about the number of posts downloaded being off. Interesting that it's with one of those posts, I can't see anything obviously wrong with either. I'll take a closer look soon!
@petebrown @matti FYI I updated MarsEdit in version 5.2, released today, so it should handle this scenario better.
@danielpunkass Very nice! Since we were able to fix my problem "by hand", I guess I am unable now to check if the update made a difference in my case, but I'm sure it would have. Great update all around btw!