It took me awhile to figure out this error I was getting on my RentVine.com and PickRent.com sites:

An error occurred while Parsing an XML document. The element type “meta” must be terminated by the matching end-tag “</meta>”

I had not changed anything on those sites in weeks. So the Crystaltech tech stop and started the Coldfusion service on the Coldfusion box the sites were on and it started working again.

Problem solved! I like when it is that simple.

Update 7/22/09: The issue came back today and I got more than 100 errors with a slightly different message:

An error occured while Parsing an XML document. The element type “Locality” must be terminated by the matching end-tag
“</Locality>”.

So I called Crystaltech and had them restart the Coldfusion service, but this time it didn’t work. Then after about 5 hours the problem just went away by itself. I asked Crystaltech if they did anything and they said no.

I am using Ray Camden’s Google Map GoogleGeoCode CFC for geocoding my addresses which is where the error is occurring.  His code can be downloaded here.

Since it went away perhaps the problem is being cause by Google’s API. So I looked in Google Groups and sure enough Google told us there was a bug and they fixed it.

For the past 4 days I have been getting the following error on my PickRent.com site:

Error on Page: http://www.pickrent.com/rentals/colorado/colorado-springs.cfm/ param: startRow=fdwjcymeklfnnz or startRow=dwpgddhufcgxz or startRow=rfdnvdpwhjoyrvc

Referral Page:

User’s IP: 66.249.68.170

Server Port: 80

Error Date: 6/21/09 3:40 PM

User’s Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

What is really odd is the trailing “/” at the end of the “.cfm”. Also odd is the URL parameter of “startRow=fdwjcymeklfnnz” which doesn’t exist. Only numbers can be used on that parameter.

I checked the IP address and it does belong to GoogleBot, but I have no idea where it is getting these random URL’s from. Perhaps it is going crazy or someone is linking to it that way.

I have fixed the issue now so it redirects home if this happens again, but I would love to know what caused this.

I created a custom feed for my videos for this page:

http://www.pickrent.com/videos/

The original custom feed validates fine:

http://www.pickrent.com/videos/feeds/feed.xml

I then burned the feed to FeedBurner:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/PickrentTv

But when I click on the RSS button in the address bar on my FF browser it sends me to a page I can’t subscribe to:

I have been getting this message for weeks, I have tried changing the email address several time without success.

I think I have it figured out, I use SmarterMail with has this brillant spam filtering called greylisting, which is:

In name, as well as operation, greylisting is related to whitelisting and blacklisting. What happen is that each time a given mailbox receives an email from an unknown contact (ip), that mail is rejected with a “try again later”-message (This happens at the SMTP layer and is transparent to the end user). This, in the short run, means that all mail gets delayed at least until the sender tries again – but this is where spam loses out! Most spam is not sent out using RFC compliant MTAs; the spamming software will not try again later.

Sounds like twitter is set up to not try again. So I added them as a safe and trusted sender to get around this issue.

Update 2/16/09: My idea did not work – anyone have any other ideas to try?

Update 4/1/09: I started using my Yahoo address for twitter and that solved the problem. Still don’t know why my other email addresses didn’t work.

Looks like Google can’t trust itself. This was happen to all sites on Google for the past 1/2 hour.

I am guessing every ones stats will show a large dip during this time.

I am sure Google lost millions of dollars over the past 30 minutes.