Ever since I created my RSS feed, I wondered why my links never showed up as links in any feed reader. The reader would always show the full html href. I finally figured it out.

My ColdFusion script that generates the feed was doing a standard character replacement to make the feed xml compliant. However the order in which I did this replacement was causing the problem. The greater-than and less-than characters were being replaced with '&.g.t.' and '&.l.t.' and THEN it would check for the '&' character (and replace it with '&.a.m.p.'). So it found all the instances in my greater-than and less-than replacements and messed them up. I can't help but laugh at such a stupid problem.

EDIT: Periods were inserted into the replaced characters because they were showing up as the actual characters!