Nothing Showing Up in Recommended Feed for iTunes

[iChris]

Hi,

Not a newbie to podcasting and I have another site running PowerPress right now that's working fine but I'm trying to add podcasting support to an existing blog and can't seem to get a valid feed out of it that works.

I have a post that shows up with the podcast properly but the feed http://www.chrisenns.com/feed/podcast/ I tried to submit to iTunes (the podcast directory and locally by subscribing to it) doesn't have any entries.

PowerPress Basic Settings screenshot link: http://l.ssktn.com/tO2r

PowerPress Feeds Settings screenshot link: http://l.ssktn.com/PEM0

PowerPress iTunes settings screenshot link: http://l.ssktn.com/5LVD

Category chosen on entry screenshot link: http://l.ssktn.com/OGys

Post with podcast player showing up properly: http://www.chrisenns.com/2012/09/too-lazy-to-blog-episode-1/

Thoughts?

[angelo]

Your feed has <!-- comments --> at the bottom added by a WP caching plugin. iTunes will not read feeds with HTML style comments at the bottom. Turn off the caching plugin, then see if the feed views correctly in Firefox, The data is there just think it's getting jacked up by the caching plugin.

Search this forum for all my repeated explanations of why you don't need a WP caching plugin.

[angelo]

And stop what ever it is redirecting to FeedBurner. If you submit your FeedBurnerfeed to iTunes, we will no longer help you here, you'll have to get help at feedburner.com.

[iChris]

Right - turned off WP caching and forgot that Dreamhost had enabled Cloudflare caching as well. Could be something in the Genesis framework that's adding comments to the feed - I'll have to investigate it further.

I should've gone with my gut and just setup a standalone site quickly for the podcast portion. Too much crap in my exisiting blog to try and tack on a podcast feed at this point.

[Todd]

This is the beauty of the plugin. It integrates with existing sites and we have a lot of users that have very very complex themes., overall we have seen very few instances when a theme does not cooperate. I run nearly 30 plugins with no conflicts with powerpress. The biggest culprit always seems to be caching plugins.

[iChris]

I know. I use your plugin on a couple other podcasts and have loved it. Those were just fresh installs and everything just worked smoothly.

For whatever reason this one isn't and I'm not blaming you guys in any way - I know your plugin works great. This was just supposed to be a quick 'n easy podcast addition to my blog - now it's turning into tech support/Google searching.

[angelo]

The comments referenced a caching plugin, and I mean HTML comments, not actual blog post comments. HTML comments look like..

Code: [Select]

<!-- comment in the HTML source here -->

[iChris]

Alright - checking it out in Firefox (i.e. view-source:http://www.chrisenns.com/feed/podcast/) it seems to look ok. RSS Validator http://validator.w3.org/appc/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.chrisenns.com%2Ffeed%2Fpodcast%2F gives an error on the &raquo character but that shouldn't be an issue? Or does it? Not sure where the character is coming from but I'll investigate further.

But iTunes still doesn't see anything when I try and subscribe to that feed.

[angelo]

You have a strange character at the beginning of the title of your first episode.

[angelo]

Also, the <content:encoded> , basically your blog post content, contains some odd characters. How did you create this blog post, aka, write the show notes?

[iChris]

Ah I think I narrowed it down to the http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/daring-fireball-linked-list/ plugin which is the only plugin that was different from some of the other sites. It was adding that &raquo character in my posts just in the RSS feed - as soon as I got rid of that iTunes was able to pick up the new podcast.

Thanks for your help in attempting to debug something that was obviously my issue. Hopefully someone else can be helped by googling for that plugin related to podcast issues.

---

Thanks,
Chris Enns

Blog chrisenns.com
Twitter @ichris

---

[angelo]

Awesome!, I see that fixed the characters in the <content:encoded> as well, they aren't all jacked up as they were before.