Question about RSS feeds (primarily ContentType)

I'm attempting to validate my rss feed on my website using feedvalidator.org.

This is my warning message:

Your feed appears to be encoded as "utf-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII"

I'm setting the contenttype to "text/xml", but for some reason it won't display as XML. Just shows up as a blob of text with no formatting. IE seems to be intelligent enough to recognize it as xml, but the validator doesn't.

I'm using C# and XmlTextWriter.

ASPX code that calls the rss method:

Response.ContentType = "text/xml";
options.GetRSS(Response.OutputStream, reader);

Code (markup):

reader is an OleDBDataReader.

Any thoughts? Does it really matter?

Feed can be seen here:

rss_top10plays.aspx

Thanks in advance.

 

I use the following in ASP
----------------
<%Response.ContentType = "text/xml"%><%Response.CharSet = "UTF-8"%><?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
----------------
try not to have a blank line in the begining

 

Charset seemed to do the trick. Thanks.

How important is the GUID element?

 

I am not sure about that .........................

Never used it.

 

GUID element is really important for a correct feed management.
It uniquely identifies the item and let feed readers know if an item is changed.

For example, if you create a feed with 10 items and tommorow you'll change a few details on the feed, without a guid the most part of feed readers will display to users all items as new.

If you put a guid no matter what you change, if the guid is the same the feed status will be the same too as long as you don't change that string.

Many parsers use guid to check if an item has already been processed instead of checking item content.