RSS feed broken

Your website may be down, as it won’t load in any browser I’ve tried. If you’re still having trouble with the feed after the site is back up, please leave a reply here so we can take a closer look at the feed and try to determine what’s going on.

Sorry for hijacking, but for some reason I am not allowed to create a new topic.

My podcast has been working just fine on Apple for years. Today I suddenly got a message from Apple that my RSS feed is not validating. Haven’t changed anything in my settings or plugin :-/

Here is the feed: https://www.bjjglobetrotters.com/feed/podcast/

Apple’s error is: “Can’t parse your feed. Invalid XML: Error on line 1: The markup in the document preceding the root element must be well-formed.”

Can anyone explain to me if I have done anything wrong??

• This reply was modified 4 years, 11 months ago by graugart.

Hi graugart,

I ran your feed thru Cast Feed Validator and it came up with an “invalid content type” warning. This is ually caused by the server hosting your website, where the server is reporting an incorrect content type for RSS feeds. Best thing to do is to contact support for the company hosting your WordPress site and ask them to check the content type and to set it correctly for a podcast feed.

I spoke with the host (bluehost) and they could not see any errors on their part. It sounds like Apple claims that the formatting of the RSS feed is wrong? It’s strange because this has worked for years and I haven’t changed anything on my site or the plugin. It is also updated to the latest version.

Apple’s error is: “Can’t parse your feed. Invalid XML: Error on line 1: The markup in the document preceding the root element must be well-formed.”

Hi graugart,

The Blubrry dev team looked at your feed and found that the site is being protected by a security service, possibly something called SlackPath. Not sure if that’s something Bluehost is doing or if you may have a plugin within your WordPress installation using this service. Regardless, it does appear that something is obscuring access to the feed from outside platforms (including Apple).

Ah fantastic, yes that must be it! Thanks!

Update! I have tried to disable both firewall and CDN but with no luck. I also moved the feed to podcastmirror.com but I am still getting the same error on Apple validator, despite the feed perfectly fine validating with castfeedvalidator :-/

This is so frustrating!

Feed: https://feeds.podcastmirror.com/bjj-globetrotters
Validator: https://castfeedvalidator.com/?url=https://feeds.podcastmirror.com/bjj-globetrotters

Error on Apple validator:

The show is not included in the Apple Podcasts directory. A technical error occurred when attempting to download an episode, metadata, or artwork. For further questions, contact us.
Can’t parse your feed. Invalid XML: Error on line 1: The markup in the document preceding the root element must be well-formed.

Hi graugart,

Please go here:
https://www.blubrry.com/contact/
Click the Select link underneath All Other Inquiries and choose Technical Support. Fill out the form with your questions and someone will get back to you with assistance. Since you’re using Blubrry services, we have to answer your questions directly in order to comply with the ToS of this support forum.