Latest Podcast not landing on iTunes, but appears fine on Stitcher

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Latest Podcast not landing on iTunes, but appears fine on Stitcher

Hello folks. I'm sure this type of question comes up all of the time. I tried researching it but it seems like the other posts I look at are just a little different from mine.

I produce a podcast and connect to iTunes via Wordpress and a plugin called 'Seriously Simple Podcasting'. I've been getting podcasts to appear regularly on iTunes and Stitcher for over a year, at a rate of about one a month. Nothing heavy: I upload the podcast to my webserver via FTP, point to that path inside WordPress, and then WordPress/SSPodcasting get the word out to Stitcher and iTunes.

Anyway, the latest podcast shows up just fine in Stitcher, but not in iTunes. Here's the details:

Podcast feed: http://www.atheos.ca/feed/podcast

Stitcher URL: http://t.co/80geLJ5puN
iTunes URL: https://itunes.apple.com/ca/podcast/river-city-rationalists/id875898979%20

Any help/advice would be much appreciated. We're a very modest podcast, but I'm freakin' out! 🙂

Thanks,

Artie/River City Rationalists

Brockville, ON, Canada

Posted on Mar 17, 2015 1:49 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 17, 2015 1:55 PM in response to Slardi

http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.atheos.ca%2Ffeed%2Fpodca st

Your feed has many errors in it - it is surprising it worked in the past.

Sadly Wordpress manage feeds are the most unreliable feeds there are and cause more issues with iTunes then anything else.

You should go back into your feed now and see if you can fix the issues. Reach out to the folks that made the plug in to see if they can help you.

You need to get your feed to the point where there are no errors in it and it validates fine.

Rob W

libsyn

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Answer 2

Slardi Author

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Mar 17, 2015 1:57 PM in response to Robert Walch

Thanks very much! That does look pretty sickly.

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Answer 3

Mar 17, 2015 3:10 PM in response to Slardi

Your feed is not working at all when subscribed to in iTunes because of garbage in the last line:

</rss><a href="http://www.greenbaymbc.org/blog33/Kamagra-Soft-tabletter/">Kamagra Soft tabletter</a>

You can't have anything after </rss>. The other errors flagged are mostly over length 'itunes:subtitle" tags but in fact iTunes doesn't bother about the 255 character maximum - it's an XML specification, but it won't affect your feed.

I couldn't access your podcast in the iTunes Store and it rather looks as if it has been removed: this could well be the case if the feed has not been working for a time. If this has happened you will have to resubmit it from scratch as a new podcast, and you'll need to change the title slightly to get round a but which will tell you the feed has already been submitted. Before you try submitting it you should subscribe to it manually in iTunes to check that everything is working once you've cleaned up the last line.

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Answer 4

Slardi Author

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Mar 17, 2015 3:15 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

I saw that last line and wondered what it was; I've had some strange advertisement pop onto the top of my blog in the last month or two and I couldn't seem to get rid of it despite changing themes, etc. The spam at the top of the page seems to change from time to time as well.

I was thinking of dropping that domain and re-starting the blog under a new subdomain of another domain I use; maybe that's best.

If I were to try to edit the feed, what tool do you recommend?

Thanks for your help!

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Answer 5

Mar 17, 2015 3:19 PM in response to Slardi

I wondered if it was spam - I've seen something like that before but I don't know how it comes about.

There aren't many podcast creation methods which allow you full access to the feed unless you are going to go in for handwriting it - that is possible but tricky because it's unforgiving: a slight error can wreck the whole thing. My page on podcasting includes a sample basic feed you can use as a template:

http://wilmut.uk/pc

There are I think one or two other methods around but I can't advise on them - you could try Googling.

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