jerrygarciuh

Q: There is no category tag in your feed, or the category tag is empty.

My feed at http://www.itsneworleans.com/audio/questions-from-the-waiting-room_rss.xml has in it

 

<itunes:category text="Science &amp; Medicine">

<itunes:category text="Social Sciences"/>

 

</itunes:category>


I have also tried it with no sub-category and also under "Society &amp; Culture".  I have compared the feed to the other feeds we publish and the syntax and values are exactly the same.


Every submission is met with "There is no category tag in your feed, or the category tag is empty."


What can I do to remedy this?

Posted on Jul 5, 2016 8:16 AM

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Q: There is no category tag in your feed, or the category tag is empty.

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  • by Roger Wilmut1,Apple recommended

    Roger Wilmut1 Roger Wilmut1 Jul 5, 2016 9:49 AM in response to jerrygarciuh
    Level 9 (78,228 points)
    iTunes
    Jul 5, 2016 9:49 AM in response to jerrygarciuh

    You have 'itunes:category' tags in your feed but they are not properly formed; they are not as you have quoted in your post. Currently they read:

     

    <itunes:category text="Science &amp;amp; Medicine"><itunes:category text="Social Sciences"></itunes:category></itunes:category>

     

    They should read:

     

    <itunes:category text="Science &amp; Medicine">

    <itunes:category text="Social Sciences" />

    </itunes:category>

     

    Note that the sub-category is in a self-closing tag within the main category tag. Note also the redundant 'amp;' in the first tag which will cause it to be rendered as 'Science &amp; Medicine'. Both errors are likely to cause the complaint you've encountered.

     

    I suspect that the program you are using to create your feed, NolaFlash XMLGEN (whatever that is), is the cause of this. It may be set up to convert any ampersands to the correct coding, &amp; - if you typed &amp; into it, it may therefore have converted the actual ampersand to the code, thus producing the result you have now. I don't know about the actual tags, whether it's seen fit to rearrange them.

     

    If you don't have an easy way of looking at the actual code the quickest way is to look at the FeedValidator report.

  • by jerrygarciuh,

    jerrygarciuh jerrygarciuh Jul 5, 2016 9:58 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1
    Level 1 (4 points)
    Publishing
    Jul 5, 2016 9:58 AM in response to Roger Wilmut1

    Thank you Roger!  https://validator.w3.org/ showed the XML as valid. Will try to remember to use FeedValidator in future.

     

    I guess PHP's DOMDocument()->setAttribute()  has changed how it handles &amp; since the other 10 podcasts all have category listed that way in database and all successfully submitted over last few years.

     

    Fixing Science &amp; Medicine was all that was needed for success. Shame their error reporting is so general.

     

    Also of interest and maybe helpful to others- when I accessed the feed directly in Google Chrome it apparently was fixing the &amp;amp so that even copying and pasting into this post I did not see the issue there.

     

    Thanks again Roger, you got me sorted!