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 & Medicine">
</itunes:category>
I have also tried it with no sub-category and also under "Society & 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
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; Medicine"><itunes:category text="Social Sciences"></itunes:category></itunes:category>
They should read:
<itunes:category text="Science & 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 & 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, & - if you typed & 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.
Posted on Jul 5, 2016 9:49 AM