Thanks to the assistance of Dan and Steven I was able to identify a problem with the RSS feeds from this server.
Technically the problem was with the newsreaders (in Steven’s case Straw and in Dan’s case NewzCrawler), not the RSS feed itself. I turned on gzip compression on my Apache server about three weeks ago to preserve bandwidth. In theory, user-agents like web browsers and RSS readers should be able to either send a “Accept-Encoding: gzip” header and accept compressed data, or, if they don’t, be sent the original non-compressed data.
Somehow this mechanism was causing problems for Steven and Dan and their RSS readers (although it didn’t affect NetNewsWire, which is what I use). For the time being, I’ve turned off compression, and this appears to have solved the problem.
Comments
“Sprocket??? I thought you said “SOCKET”! Hello? Is this thing on?”
Hmm. And I was thinking of turning mod_gzip on for my site, since I was rudely informed by the web page analyzer
http://www.websiteoptimization…
that my page _badly_ needed to get on the SlimFast diet. Since I’ve only used NetNewWire myself, I never thought of the consequences for poorly-written RSS aggregators like the ones listed above. Perhaps I’ll rethink that dietary supplement.
I am 
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