Thought I would pass on a solution to an error I encountered with the podcast feed on this very WordPress site. I noticed the latest episode of the podcast hadn’t appeared in iTunes. I did the usual thing then of validating my podcast feed and got the following error:

XML parsing error: :3:0: XML or text declaration not at start of entity

That didn’t make a lot of sense to a layperson like me, so I did some digging and it pointed me to an issue I hadn’t noticed when I validated the feed: the first two lines of the feed were blank.

This is a problem. So after some more digging it became apparent that the issue can be in a number of WordPress files. Essentially there can’t be any free space before the starting tag in your PHP files.Some people find the space in their function.php file (in your theme folder), others in their wp-config file.

That’s exactly where my issue was. I had to blank lines at the bottom of my config file (shown as the pink line):

Deleting those spaces worked a treat, with the feed validating fine once I’d done that. Hope this helps someone!