Podcast feed not validating

I got the same problem!!!

I have 3 series running and not one of RSS feeds will validate either.

@ttomasini Your feed URL is not actually an RSS feed at all. That means that you have something else on your site (probably another plugin) that is conflicting with SSP and breaking things. You will need to find out which plugin is conflicting as there’s nothing I can do to assist otherwise.

@nadjapretty @ToddOddBot I can’t really help you unless you send me a link to your feed as the issue(s) that you’re experiencing will be unique to your site and not something generic.

hello Hugh,

Yes of course, sorry about that… RSS feeds below.

https://www.paudkast.com/feed/podcast/music-makers

https://www.paudkast.com/feed/podcast/the-secret-diaries-of-tara-tremendous

https://www.paudkast.com/feed/podcast/transmissions

Thanks for your help!

@ToddOddBot What feed validator are you using? The best one to use for podcast feeds is castfeedvalidator.com and with that one all of your feeds validate just fine. Example: https://castfeedvalidator.com/?url=https://www.paudkast.com/feed/podcast/music-makers

Have you tried submitting them to iTunes are did you just use a validator and stop there?

@HughLashbrooke,

I’ve tried them all including castfeedvalidator.com… (https://validator.w3.org/feed/) (https://feedvalidator.org) and a couple of others. castfeedvalidator.com said it was fine but the others say it’s not… I have all three series on iTunes but what’s happening is that I posted a podcast this morning at 7am and it shows up in iTunes then it disappears, I try different searches and it shows the 2 episodes, then I search again and it shows only 1. I’ve been having people test this all over the US in different locations and it yields the same results… sometimes there sometimes not. So, I’ve been trying to problem solve all night to figure out why and I ran into the validators that said “Sorry This feed does not validate”. Makes no sense to me and the errors it gives me… well, I just don’t even know where to start.

Thanks for your help Hugh, I really appreciate it.

If the episodes are appearing on iTunes and then disappearing then the issue has nothing to do with this plugin, so there’s not much I can do to help unfortunately. For issues like that you will need to contact iTunes support and ask why episodes are disappearing and why different people are seeing different things.

There’s just not any more that I can do as this is an iTunes issue and not an SSP issue. The validation errors that you’re seeing are not real problems, which is why you should trust a dedicated podcast feed validator like castfeedvalidator.com instead of the other more generic validation services.

Thank you Hugh, appreciate your help. Like I said I was just problem solving and ran into several validators that came back with the same results so I figured that there must be a bigger issue at hand… you know you try 3-4 validators and it gives you the same results and then you try one and it says it’s fine, most people will go with the majority.

Thanks again.

Yeah I totally understand. The issue is that a lot of validators do not actually cater for podcast feeds as podcasts have a number of specific tags that most validators don’t understand.

Hugh,

What’s the process for re-generating the feed as the plugins are de-activated.

Do I just disable plugin and re-submit feed, or do I have to regenerate the feed in some way?

Thanks

Hi Hugh,
I deactivated all my plug-ins. Then activated SSP again , saved all the settings again, validated the URL at CastFeedValidator.
This is the result:

https://castfeedvalidator.com/?url=https://www.jamul.org/feed/podcast
Basic Feed Validation OK…
Error
This XML document is invalid, likely due to invalid characters. XML error: syntax error at line 1, column 54
This feed validated in 0.680575847626 seconds

When I look in my files directory, I can’t even find the xml file to have a look at it.
What’s going on?
Please help, I have been spending soooo many hours on this.
Thank you,
Nadja

@ttomasini You do not need to ‘regenerate’ the feed. It is generated dynamically every time you request it so it always contains your latest content. It looks like you actually have a folder on your server named feed/podcast in which you have stored your audio files. The podcast feed has that same URL, so the folder structure is being fetched instead of the feed. You will, however, still be able to use this basic feed URL: https://www.hessel.org/?feed=podcast – that works for you and you will be able to submit that it iTunes

@nadjapretty The XML file does not exist – it is generated dynamically and is a ‘virtual’ file if you will. You actually have the same problem as ttomasini above in that you have a folder named feed/podcast on your server. The basic URL, however, does not work for you and the only reason I can think for that would be that you deaxtivated the SSP plugin.

Thank you so much. I will look into that.
??

Thanks Hugh, the basic feed URL was accepted. ONE QUICK QUESTION PLEASE-

Should I rename my server folders to have a different URL from the Podcast feed to alleviate the conflict?

Terry

@ttomasini If you want to alleviate the conflict then yes, but the basic URL will always work, so there’s no need to do that if you’re happy with how things are now.

If this has helped you then please support continued development by leaving a review ??

Cheers,
Hugh