But if I subscribe to my podcast and look at the show notes through my Library in Apple Podcasts that way, then all is normal.

This means that anyone peeking into my show notes on Apple Podcasts before subscribing are seeing that broken view of my show notes.

This didn’t happen before I added the Blubrry plug-in.

How do I fix this?

I was getting many <br/> tags inserted which resulted in my content having many extra lines when viewed from podcast players. The PowerPress RSS feed was converting blank lines to <br/> tags.

I figured out where the blank lines were coming from. I’m using a custom post type for my podcast episode entries. I had enabled the Gutenberg “blocks” editor. Enabled by the 'show_in_rest' => true arg in the register_post_type function. When viewed as text/code, this showed it was adding “blocks” helper comments. These comments don’t appear in the raw HTML of a rendered page. However they end up leaving blank lines in the HTML.

PowerPress was interpreting the blank lines as <br/> tags. In my view, this is an undesired behavior. If I want it to be HTML, then any space between non-HTML tags could be collapsed or removed.

I disabled the blocks editor and found it works better using the older “raw” HTML “text” version. However, even adding explicit <p> tags with content, the <p> tags are stripped out of the RSS feed and replaced with <br/> tags. This ends up making it more difficult to get a desired combined webpage and RSS feed format.

Also, I noticed that WP aggressively removes <p> tags if I switch to the editor’s “visual” tab. So I have to avoid doing that.

Are there other recommendations you make for improving the display of episode posts and their rendered show notes in players?

I have a longstanding issue with show notes using the Powerpress plugin on my WordPress site.

Show notes (the blog post containing te episode) do not show up properly both in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

My podcast rss feed is:
https://azeletmegminden.hu/feed/podcast/

1. In Apple Podcasts show notes get a weird formatting: inserted blank lines, no hyperlinks, no time stamps etc. My feed does contain the whole blog post content between <content:encoded> tags, but weirdly the whole thing is repaeated in the feed once again (for every episode) between <itunes:summary> tags with a lot of <br> tags inserted and text cut short.

2. On Spotify only the description appears, no post content. (I suspect it has something to do the inserted BR-lines in the <itunes:summary>, since it tries to use that thing instead of the proper blog post content in the RSS feed between the <content:encoded> tags.)

3. I would also like to note here, that the time stamp format in my feed does not correspond with Spotify standards (but since post content is ignored completely, they do not show up anyway in any format): Spotify asks for a format with parentheses (hh:mm:ss), but Blubrry RSSS feed provides time stamps without them. That could be a problem even if the blog content could appear. But obviously, it can’t.

There are podcast players that show blog post content properly (e.g. Podcast Addict). It seems like it uses the first, proper instance of the blogpost containing the episode info, while Apple Podcasts uses the second between the <itunes:summary> tags (which is a garbled, truncated version, and I do not know why it is there).

Could you please help me with this issue?

Thanks,

Szabolca

They say the show will need to include the full episode notes in the description tag in order for the full notes to appear on their platform. How do I change this in WordPress?

Also, why are there no ‘share’ options or buttons, so a listener can easily SHARE the show?

Last question, if you add a place under and on top of player to insert banner codes or ad codes and put in a refresh that part of the player to show fresh ads every 30 or 60 seconds, then you would rule podcasting as the ultimate player to monetize podcasts.

I’ve never seen any podcast player pull in ads and then refresh them.

Since people are listening long periods of time it could do great.

But I guess most people don’t listen and look at a player, they multi task and do other things while listening, but ad rotation above and below a player even for 1 ad each spot could help monetize podcasts.

I have a problem with Skip-to-Position time codes: they do not display in the show notes pulled by Podcast Addict and iTunes (did not check it in other apps).

Funny because Podcast Addict automatically makes a time code format text into a link, but it just skips the time-code line provided in the podcast episode RSS.
So it displays nothing, not even a plain text time code.

It is the same in iTunes: no time codes, just a blank line.

Am I missing here something to make this feature work in the show notes?

Thanks,

Szabolcs

I appreciate the guidance!

I use the PowerPress Plugin to get my podcast episodes on the apple podcast app. I want the show notes in the podcast app to look like the text in my blog post (same format) However, the shown notes in the apple podcast app are never formatted like my blog post. The app takes all the text and links from the blog post and creates one big paragraph. Instead of paragraph breaks the app separates the text that is formatted as paragraphs in the blog post and adds in large spaces.

So far I have been including sources in my blog post as the actual URL link. The apple podcast app throws all these links into the same big paragraph. They can still be clicked, but it doesn’t look appealing.

I wonder if this is a common problem. Is there any setting I could change in the PowerPress PlugIn?

Thanks

Max