Parsing links from an XML files with JavaScript

To display my latest blog-posts on a different page I want to parse the rss-feed from the blog and then generate elements with it.

I first tried to parse a fixed .xml file for which I wrote the following code:

    var maxBlogposts = 5;
    var blogPosts = 0;
     $.get("rss.xml", function(data) {
        $(data).find("item").each(function() {
            if(blogPosts === maxBlogposts) return;
            var el = $(this);

            //Only display 3 posts on small devices.
            var extra = (blogPosts >= 3) ? "not-small 12u(small)" : "12u(small)";
            var div = $('<div class="6u ' + extra + '" class="blog-entry"></div>');
            var h = $('<h4><a href="' + el.find("link").text() + '">' + el.find("title").text() + '</a></h4>');
            var description = el.find("description").text().replace('[&#8230;]', '<a href="' + el.find("link").text() + '">[&#8230;]</a>');
            var p = $('<p>' + description + '</p>');
            div.append(h);
            div.append(p);
            $('#blog').append(div);
            blogPosts++;

        });
    });

This worked perfectly fine. Now I want to parse the actual rss-feed. For this I wrote a PHP script which simply gets the feed and echos it.

<?php

$rss = file_get_contents('http://ift.tt/1zpKETL');
die($rss);

?>

And again I get the correct XML file on the frontend.

The problem I have is that now my code is no longer working. Getting the description was failing as well as the links. I fixed the description by accessing

 el.find(description")[0].innerHTML

However I can't seem to get the links to work. The data returned from the PHP file contains a node with the link in it. The "el"-element also contains children named "link" but those no longer contain the actual link.

I feel like the links may get "escaped" during parsing? At least that is the only reason i could think of that would result in what I am observing.