Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
My podcast has been on iTunes for years and I update it with a new episode every weekend. This weekend my feed won't work though. I suspect Apple changed something again. They've done this several times before and each time it breaks my feed. My feed passes at feedvalidator.org and the podcast still shows up in iTunes with a description of the show, but no episodes. Here is my feed: http://www.reluctantradio.org/oaks.rss
It's not the feed that's the problem (and it's not something that Apple have done): your server is not responding to requests for the media files. I got the 'server unexpectedly dropped connection' error. This is something you will need to take up with the people running your server.
To check your server quickly, simply click on this link to your latest episode in Safari - it should play in the browser.
http://www.reluctantradio.com/Podcast/ReluctantRadio/121028.mp3
I don't know what went wrong this time. That's never happened before. Obviously there's something I don't understand about where the iTunes application reads the .rss feed from. I doesn't appear to be reading it directly from my server like the browsers do. Perhaps Apple copies the feed to their own server and iTunes reads it from there or something? That's the only explanation I can think of.
Ths Store caches the feed but subscribers read it directly from your server: when clicking the subscribe button they are directed to the feed URL the Store is using. Let's try and unravel this.
You originally had the Store using a feed at
http://www.ReluctantRadio.com/oaks.rss
which was not working. It now is, and it contains the 'new-feed-url' tag redirecting to
http://www.ReluctantRadio.org/Podcast/ReluctantRadio/oaks.rss
That is the feed that now turns up when you click the Subscribe button, which is what you would expect. The Store itself may not yet have turned over to this feed but probably has. If not it will do so on the next check.
The latest episode is included in both feeds: it is that of 11 November and this shows when subscribing and also in the Store. So as far as I can see everything is working correctly and I am not sure what it is that is worrying you.
Feed no longer works
