I recently encountered this error two days ago when I try to change my feedburner feeds to enable podcasting feeds. After adding additional wordpress plugins there it goes my feeds suddenly doesn’t seem to work. Code error creeps in our site and it has been a headache for a while. So the trouble shooting begins. First I try to resolve the error from my RSS feeds by going to www.feedvalidator.org the site give me the following solution so I followed the steps faithfully.

Message
Blank line before XML declaration (WordPress)

Explanation

If an XML declaration () appears in your feed, it must be the first thing in the feed, before any whitespace.
Unfortunately, with WordPress it seems all too easy for a plugin, a theme, or for your configuration file to contain a blank line. Further compounding this problem, some — but not all — feed readers compensate for this common error, allowing the error to go undetected for quite a while. I checked all the php scripts that pertains to RSS feed to check if there’s a blank line before the ?. Then I checked the wp-config.php, including the functions.php of the theme I’m using. To my dismay all the scripts doesn’t have a blank line.

Solution

* PHP also uses a similar notation: . Note that the final php ?> should be omitted from all PHP code files—modules, includes, etc. The closing delimiter is optional in PHP (but not in XML), and removing it helps prevent unwanted white space at the end of files which can cause problems with your feeds.
* Check your wp-rss2.php and wp-atom.php files for blank lines outside of bracketed sections.
* Check your wp-config.php file for blank lines outside of bracketed sections.
* Check your theme’s functions.php file for blank lines outside of bracketed sections.
* One by one, disable plugins and revalidate until you isolate the one causing the problem.

So the final solution is to disable the plugins we’re using which is quite painful especially if you’re site’s layout are dependent on the plugins that you are using. So you’re solution would be either to ignore your RSS; error or do it painfully and start troubleshooting. Of course the reward would be excellent.
See now my feeds are working.

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