Apple Podcasts tells me it can’t read my feed

Hi @dborys1,

Thank you for using Seriously Simple Podcasting. I sincerely apologize for the issue you are experience.

I tried to test your feed validation on https://castfeedvalidator.com/ and it returned a forbidden error.

I have taken a look at your feed and have gotten ERR_TOO_MANY_REDIRECTS error, this is usually linked to an SSL error, or redirecting when there is no SSL certificate present.

Would you mind solving your feed error so I may validate your feed again.

Thank you Andrew, I think this initial feed error problem was a result of an unnecessary redirection. I have stopped the redirection, so hopefully that might have solved the problem. Without the redirection, however, I assume that the feed will continue to be the original “old” feed https://coolcanadianhistory.com/category/podcasts/feed/ ?

Hi Andrew, I believe i have fixed the redirection issue. Are you able to tell if the link is any better? I am still dealing with 3 key problems

1) My title icon is fuzzy on the Apple iTunes podcast app, even though it meets the minimum pixel requirement for Apple

2) My excerpts still fail to show up, the only thing that shows up in the episode descriptions are long url links to the episode even though I have filled in the excerpts when posting the eps

3) The title of my podcast shows incorrectly even though it is written correctly in the SPP feed details

Any thoughts on these issues? Thanks!

Hi David,

I see the that the podcast feed is live and updated properly in iTunes as of your May 1st episode. Seems like the redirect loop you were previously caught in is solved.

With respect to the image being blurry do you have a higher res version of the image? Even when I take out the “?fit=32%2C32<” suffix to the image it’s only 512x512px. This may be contributing to the fuzziness of the image.

With respect to the excerpts and podcast title, I would suppose the difficulty there is arising from the /category/ functionality you’re wanting to add to your podcast feed. Is it necessary to only be pulling podcast episodes from a certain post category in WordPress? Introducing this additional code in the plugin will bring in the potential of theme conflicts as well since your feed does some work around the category archive query. If you don’t need the /category/ filter I would remove it, redirect that feed to the original /feed/podcast feed and the excerpt and podcast title issue would be resolved.

Otherwise if you need to have the /category/ aspect to your feed then I would suggest making modifications to the feed as described here: https://www.seriouslysimplepodcasting.com/documentation/how-can-i-edit-the-content-of-the-rss-feed/

Hi Craig,

thank you for your response.

In respect to the image I have, the one I uploaded is indeed 1400 x 1401 pixels. I’m not sure why all of a sudden the image is below that pixel rate. But I assure you the one that I am uploading into the “cover image” section meets the minimum pixel rate requirements. It’s the same image file that I used when I initially set up my podcast two years ago and I had no problems with it until I migrated to wp.org and started using SPP.

In regards to the category functionality, I certainly don’t need to use it at all. But if I don’t select the “podcasts” category functionality my posts don’t show up in my iTunes podcast feed. For instance, I just went back and edited S2E16 (the most recent episode) and I removed all categories (which automatically made it ‘uncategorized’) the episode immediately disappeared from my the podcast app on my iPhone. Or am I misunderstanding what category you are specifically talking about? How can I remove the category functionality?

Thanks,

David

As a follow up I solved the excerpt issue by going to Dashboard – Settings – Reading and changing the setting in ‘For Each Article in a Feed’ from ‘full text’ to ‘summary.’

I have re-uploaded an image into the podcast feed cover image that is 1400-1401.

The category issue is still problematic, if I do not select the category ‘Podcasts’ when I am posting a new episode it does not show up in iTunes