I have a podcast feed that I've validated at http://validator.w3.org as well as http://www.feedvalidator.org. Both tests say that my feed is valid. When I try to submit the feed URL to iTunes, I get the response: "We had difficulty reading this feed. Bad http result code: 501". Any suggestions as to what I'm missing?
What is the RSS feed you are trying to submit?
Regards,
Rob W
podCast411
Although your feed validates, and can be accessed in a browser and subscribed to in iTunes - and also the media files are correctly hosted on a server which can handle byte-range requests (a required facility) - the server hosting your feed is for some reason unable to handle requests specifically from the iTunes Store. This situation has arisen before but no obvious solution has been suggested (one poster with a similar problem found that it was a permissions issue on the server). This is something you will need to take up with the people running your server - their logs may possibly give some indication of what the problem is.
Thanks for the info, Roger. Are there places where one can host files specifically for Podcasting? Any reccomendations as to where to turn if I can't get our current host to manage correctly? - Phil
Any website hosting service ought to be fine, provided that it can handle byte-range requests (this is required for the media files so that iOS devices can play them - your current server does). That's something you would always need to check, but I've no idea why the current problem is arising: all I can say is that it doesn't bother most podcasters.
Hi Phil,
I am with Libsyn.com - which is 100% compliant with iTunes.
If you have any questions about the libsyn service please let me know.
rob at libsyn dot com
Rob W
Thanks Robert and Roger for your help. I appreciate it!
Bad http result code 501 when submitting a validated feed to iTunes
