RSS techy question

[HelenAndGraham]

Not sure where I should post this but....

I am currently building a few sites to draw content from eBid RSS feeds but keep running in to a format problem.

Each time I use a loop to display a sequence of items from an eBid RSS feed each successive item listing tabs slightly to the right and it blows the whole page layout.

I have no problems working with eBay's feeds or Tazbar's feeds and the only significant difference I can see between their feeds and eBid's is the character encoding used by eBid which is utf-8.

The tabbing issue only occurs when I include the description content of the feed. I have no problem when just displaying the headline links. This again makes me think it is the character encoding causing my problem.

This isn't the first time I've hit problems with parsing and displaying utf-8 encoded feeds but unfortunately it's proving impossible for me to be certain this is the issue. I've tried a variety of parsing scripts, I've also tried displaying each individual item in separate <div> tags and even individual HTML tables aligned to the left to try and overcome the problem!

It's got to the point I'm going bonkers now so it's time to ask for help....

Is anyone else currently developing web content using eBid's feeds and found a similar problem or (fingers crossed) managed to work around this problem at all?

I can work with just the item listing titles but the absence of images and description text will make the finished web page appearance pretty bland so I'd like to persevere and find a solution if possible.

Thanks in advance for any help available.

[gazza]

We'll take a look.

Gazza

[HelenAndGraham]

Thanks Gazza.

I've just converted the entire site I'm working on to work with UTF-8 and I'm still getting this outward step of each item in the feed.

If it's easy enough for you to do is it worth trying a switch to charset=iso-8859-1 and I can run a test within a few minutes to see if it is the character encoding.

If it helps I've run tests with a feed that has listings with no images in addition to a feed with images and the stepping out still occurs. Maybe there are some blank spaces or some other invisible characters being added to the end of the description element of the feed that I can't see?

Really appreciate your help.

[HelenAndGraham]

Just to follow up.

We've gone public with the first site's existence so you can have a look at what I'm talking about.

The site is www.eBidSellers.info

The site will be used to promote the eBid listings for sellers who are members of Pheebay. At the moment we've just now publicised it so there's only a couple of eBidders on the site but you can see how the listings appear and the gradual stepping out to the right that is occuring.

If you look at my listings whch don't have images you will see the same happens.

While the site may signpost a few buyers to eBid the other aim is to help peoples listings feature better at the search engines. The RSS feed is displayed as plain HTML so it will get crawled and indexed. Therefore, as the site matures and gets ranked, it should lend some help to the participating eBid sellers own SEO effort.

If you have any issues with the site Gazza feel free to say as we are trying to be positive but can obviously alter or even remove things if you're not happy.