phuffstatler and all,
I also get this error after upgrading to WP 2.9 from WP 2.8.6. The Development Blog and the Other WordPress News autofeeds are showing “RSS Error: The data could not be converted to UTF-8” in their dashboard panes.
My hoster is GoDaddy, MySQL is 5.x. I’ve been using WP on their hosting for 2.5 years, now, no problems on that side before. I suspect a small code snippet somewhere…
DocTeeRex
As further info: I found that my Google Analytics pane says “No Analytics account selected. Double check you are authenticated with Google on Google Analyticator’s settings page and make sure an account is selected.” and my Incoming Links pane has the RSS error posted previously.
My Google Analytics has always worked just fine, and I use it extensively. Incoming Links was working yesterday; I upgraded this morning…
Just wondering: what do those 4 panes have in common in the PHP code?
DocTeeRex
have you tried deactivating all your plugins to see if the problem goes away?
I just had a plugin that had nothing to do with incoming links and rss totally kill my rss, hard to tell what will conflict with what….
Not sure about the Google Analytics issue but the RSS problem is known and has been logged in Trac. See http://www.semiologic.com/2009/12/21/wp-2-9-three-bugs-and-how-to-fix-them/
i have a similar rss feed prob… i’m surprised that one got through the testing