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How to add a RSS feed to a Wordpress blog?

I'm usually pretty decent with computer stuff - but somehow this whole RSS feed thing escapes me.
How do I add one to my blog? I spent a while trying to look it up online a few days ago but had zero luck. Apparently rss feeds are my Achilles tendon of the blog world?
My website is here if you want to look at it: http://everydayillusion.com

And I really want one of the rss feeds where you click on it and it pops up the bookmarks folder, not the kind that takes you to a third party website. Thanks in advance if you can help!

Tags: help, rss

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Permalink Reply by Nick Tabick on January 27, 2010 at 3:59pm

Your feed will validate once this is resolved. Notice the "unclosed" CDATA section with the same area highlighted that I circled in my screenshot? Same problem.

I'm doing my best to come up with a solution. If you want to try something, you can try re-downloading the latest WordPress ZIP from WordPress.org and re-uploading the entire package. This won't erase anything (provided you don't lose wp-config.php somehow in the process; you might want to back that up to be safe), but if a file is incomplete (unlikely but possible), this should fix it.

Also, changing your theme won't have ANYTHING to do with the RSS feed. Themes do not play any role beyond including the <link> tag so popular browsers and tools can "detect" your feed. Feel free to change it back.

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Permalink Reply by Nick Tabick on January 29, 2010 at 10:45am

I have one small idea about what could be causing this, but if it's not the case then it might help for me to have access to the blog backend (if you don't mind).

Do you write your posts in another text/document editor and copy them over? While I don't see any markup in the HTML for your blog that might hint at your use of Microsoft Office or similar, I wonder (assuming you copy/paste, that is) if something's being copied along that the RSS script just doesn't like or can't deal with. While it's an odd problem to have, it is a possibility.

I'll keep paging through the WordPress Codex and ask a few fellow WP IRC support members in the meantime.

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Permalink Reply by Anna on January 29, 2010 at 11:35pm

Okay, sorry for the slow response. On top of everything else, my mouse died and for some reason I can't reply to this thread/forum from my iphone.

Now that I have a mouse again, I'm going to reinstall wordpress. I type directly into the browser, so I don't think that anything should be interfering that way. I'll post back here once I do the reinstall and let you know how it went.

Thanks again for your patience and for helping me out with this, Nick.

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Permalink Reply by Nick Tabick on January 30, 2010 at 12:05am

Anytime. :)

Let me know how the WordPress reinstallation goes.

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Permalink Reply by Anna on January 29, 2010 at 11:38pm

Oh and - you can email me if you'd like about accessing the website from the backend.

anna @ everydayillusion dot com

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Permalink Reply by Nick Tabick on January 30, 2010 at 12:06am

Let's wait and see what your efforts turn up before we worry about this. If a reinstallation doesn't fix it, we can come back to it.

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Permalink Reply by Anna on January 30, 2010 at 1:25am

Before I reinstalled I went ahead and disabled ALL my plugins to just to double check, and now nothing works. I can fix it by reinstalling one specific plugin (Customizable Permalinks) but I'm wondering if there is some way to fix it to see if maybe this plugin is the problem after all?

Reinstalling didn't seem to help.

It looks like the plugin did something to my links that cause them to break now, but even with it disabled everything seems to not be working properly. Argh, so confused.

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Permalink Reply by Nick Tabick on January 30, 2010 at 4:45pm

Well, your (original) issue with the RSS feed shouldn't be caused by that plugin (theoretically), but it definitely made things much more interesting because, as of right now, your feed URL just redirects to itself over and over.

You could probably get away with disabling said plugin and removing your .htaccess, then resorting to letting WordPress re-write one with one of the default permalink structures. You might take a hit from search engines, but I really wouldn't worry about it. ;)

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Permalink Reply by Anna on January 31, 2010 at 1:35am

So - the next step is to try to get the website to work without that plugin I guess? And then go from there?
How exactly do I go about restoring?

Nick - if you want access to the back end you can, and do whatever. I'm kind of ready to wash my hands of it and go sans RSS feed all together.

It's a new website so I don't think I'm even indexed by search engines yet.