Half podcast episodes missing

Question

Half podcast episodes missing

Only half of my podcast episodes are turning up in iTunes - I think this is because Feedburner isn't picking up on them (http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThePilgrimsPodcast). I may be past some maximum information limit. Is there some way to either filter my blog feed to only include posts with podcast audio (like, instead of plugging in the website's URL - plug in the URL for a blogger label)? Or should I figure out another hosting service?

https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-pilgrims-podcast/id942105067?mt=2

Windows 8

Posted on Apr 7, 2015 8:51 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Roger Wilmut1

Level 10

131,146 points

Apr 7, 2015 1:23 PM in response to Chesterbelloc95

Your feed has seven episodes with playable media, and these show in iTunes (episodes 7 to 13). It also has numerous episodes which have no playable media, and these are not shown in iTunes. There are 25 episodes in all.

The feed has been originally constructed in Blogger, and if you were expecting to see older episodes in it, it's likely that Blogger is limiting you to 25 episodes shown in the feed, older ones being moved to an archive page and out of the feed - something that many services do.

Of course if you are going to mix weblog and podcast episodes in the same feed then this sort of thing is going to happen. Neither Feedburner nor Blogger can detect the difference. It's better to keep the podcast episodes in their own separate feed. However there may be a setting in Blogger to allow you to include more episodes. The iTunes Store doesn't impose a limit until you get to 301.

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Answer 2

Apr 7, 2015 1:24 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

Thanks. Any recommendations for good hosting services?

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Answer 3

Apr 7, 2015 2:38 PM in response to Chesterbelloc95

As to actual hosting, i.e. just providing the server space for the feed and episode media files, any normal web server will do provided that it will handle 'byte range requests' (the method used by iOS devices to access podcast files) which is mandatory, and so something you should confirm before comitting to a service,

Podcast creation methods are very variable; the free ones are liable to be unsatisfactory and usually have little or no support.

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Answer 4

Apr 7, 2015 2:51 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

So - just to be clear, the issue is with Blogger, probably - and thus I should find a site that will create a longer feed on Feedburner (perhaps Wordpress)? Imagine that you're talking to someone with little to no experience regarding servers and such. Smartcast is basically the only way I have of interacting with code in a way I understand.

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Answer 5

Apr 7, 2015 2:56 PM in response to Chesterbelloc95

I'm not clear whether the episode media files are in Blogger or have been added by Feedburner using Smartcast. But in any case it's the number of actual episodes in the feed which matters. The first thing to do is to look in Blogger for a way of increasing the number of episodes in the feed. Wordpress should be approached with caution - it's difficult to use and causes more problems reported here than all the other methods put together (though most of them are caused by a failure to use it correctly).

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Answer 6

Apr 7, 2015 3:26 PM in response to Roger Wilmut1

I figured out a way to increase the number of posts to 50 in Feedburner, but I'm not sure if iTunes will detect the old episodes now (they haven't showed up in the iTunes feed yet).

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Answer 7

Apr 7, 2015 7:42 PM in response to Chesterbelloc95

If you are still having issues - if you host with libsyn and use the libsyn feed the issues will go away.

Libsyn also supports publishing directly to your Blogger Blog.

If you would like more info on libsyn - email me - rob at libsyn (dot) com

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Answer 8

Apr 9, 2015 7:48 AM in response to Robert Walch

Thanks for the suggestion - I've solved it for now by letting Feedburner display more posts, but at some point I'll need a better solution.

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