Latest episode didn’t appear in some apps

Something is injecting a blank line at the top of your podcast RSS feed and that’s causing the feed to break. The first step in trying to fix this is:
1.) Log in to your WordPress site
2.) Go to PowerPress >> Settings, Advanced Mode >> Feeds tab and find the “Don’t allow other plugins to modify podcast feeds” option and then check the box next to it
3.) Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page and clear any site caches, if applicable

Respond here when you’ve done that and I’ll take another look at the feed and see if the blank line is still there.

Not sure about caches, but I just checked the box you mentioned.

The blank line is still at the top of the feed. The most common cause for this is a conflict with either your WordPress theme or a plugin outside of PowerPress. This page has more suggestions on how to diagnose the source of the issue:
https://create.blubrry.com/resources/powerpress/using-powerpress/diagnosing-feed-andor-player-issues-with-powerpress/

OK, but are you sure this is the issue? This feed was working fine until the latest episode.

If you load the feed URL in a web browser like Google Chrome, you can see the blank line at the top. Blank lines at the top of feeds always cause problems with feeds being read by podcasting apps/platforms. These blank lines also cause parsing issues with feed validators that cause feeds to come up as invalid.

I see. Well, I appreciate your trying to help, but I can’t really make that explanation fit, because a) I looked at the feed in Chrome and didn’t see the blank line, and b) there were no changes in plugins on my site between December’s last successful podcast publication and this week’s ongoing failure.

Could the new year have something to do with it? Something expired?

I tried re-posting the same episode, and a couple hours later it appeared on Pocket Casts! So, problem solved. Apparently something went screwy in that particular blog post.

• This reply was modified 5 years, 10 months ago by stingpin.

Curiouser and curiouser! The same problem has now occured with my OTHER WordPress podcast site! I just tried creating a new post for the latest episode of that show, too, so we’ll see if that works again.

Again, no plugins, etc have changed on this site since the previous, successful podcast episode publication in this feed.

https://deconstructingcomics.com/?feed=podcast

It worked. I don’t understand why, though.

Hello @stingpin,

You may not have logged in yourself and updated a theme or plugin, but they may be auto updating for you by your web host. It only takes one update where the developer leaves a blank line in the end of the source file to cause this to happen. I’ve ven even this if the wp-config.php gets modified and the <?php at the very top line gets move down one line. If this happens again though, please reply with a list of your active plugins and the name and URL where to get your theme so we can reproduce the problem.

BTW RSS XML is strict, if there is a blank line at the top then it is technically invalid, this is why a blank line can cause the validation and directory updating problems.

Thanks for being a PowerPress user,
Angelo

I looked at it, but I couldn’t see the blank line Shawn mentioned.

Yeah, it could be some kind of auto update, especially since it happened in BOTH feeds. But creating new blog posts for both worked, so hopefully the next episodes will go up the FIRST time.

I’ll be back if it goes badly again. No news is good news. Thanks.