Itunes Spacing

Hello James,

I looked up the show and podcast feed, I see a lot of <br> tags in the iTunes summary field. The iTunes summary comes from your content with most of the HTML removed and new lines converted to BR tags. I suspect there may be some HTML comment tags in your blog post content and that is not getting stripped correctly for the feed content. Are you familiar with how to edit the post content as raw HTML (rather than in the blocked or style editor) to see what may be happening?

We definitely want to fix this, but we’ll need to know what is happening to the content and what it looks like for us to replicate it in our test environment.

Thanks,
Angelo

Thanks for the quick response. Yes, I have checked the raw html and the only thing at the beginning and end of each paragraph is <p> there is no <br>. All I’m doing is writing the content into a paragraph block on a WordPress post and then posting it. I use no other formatting.

However, I just copied my show’s description in powerpress and then pasted it into a word document and removed all formatting. It then showed that there are multiple lines between each paragraph. I am not sure why wordpress is putting in a <br> when it’s only a new paragraph, not a break.

any suggestions?

Hello James,

The itunes:summary field is actually PowerPress that creates that from your WordPress content. We used to trim multiple returns but we had podcasters complain as they wanted to add return lines on purpose. If your pasting in content that has extra lines though that would explain the excessive BR tags. By design if you put new lines in the formatting we will assume you want them there for the podcast itunes Summary.

Note you should not be having an issue for someone who is subscribed and uses the show notes view in iOS Podcast app, that will show the HTML which uses the P tags for formatting rather than the new line characters.

One thing I do, though it may not work for you, is copy content from Word then paste it into notepad, then re-highlight and copy from notepad then paste into WordPress to eliminate the weird formatting and spaces that Microsoft adds.

Hope that helps,
Angelo

Ok, thanks. I’ll have to copy and then paste to a notepad to remove the formatting. But, no I do not copy and paste into the wordpress blocks when I type. I type as is and then when it posts it gets the extra lines.

Too bad, I have to do that additional step of pasting to a notepad, but if that’s what it takes, I guess I will do it.

Thank you for your response.

So I have done what you suggested and removed any formatting that may be in the text. I copied and pasted into the iTunes description in power press and refreshed my feeds. I’m still getting spaces between paragraphs.

Additionally, there are now multipole spaces between paragraphs in my show notes on iTunes. I have tried it two ways to input my text. I have used the classic block and removed all formatting but there are still many lines between paragraphs. I have also use the paragraph blocks that you use for a post and I am still getting the same spacing issues.

Hello. Please take a look at my rss feed. You can see where the blog post shows the correct spacing, but what PowerPress reports in the episode is the multiple <b>s that we are seeing.

RSS: https://www.jamesmillerlifeology.com/feed/podcast/?redirect=no
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/self-responsibility-guest-elliott-robertson/id1052615988?i=1000465210350

I don’t know why PowerPress is adding the extra spaces.

PowerPress is not adding the extra space, but it leaves the spaces that are there created by other plugins.

To understand what is happening, in the XML markup of the podcast feed the <content:encoded> goes to the iOS podcast app show notes, where-as the <itunes:summary> goes on the website of Apple.com. the iTunes summary getting the raw data from your blog post is what is the problem.

If you do not mind, go to edit one of your blog posts, then click the option to view the the TEXT, do you see this extra spaces or possibly comment lines? I suspect a theme or plugin is adding extra lines with comment tags, the comment tags get stripped but the new lines they leave will remain causing this problem.

we believe this is an isolated issue with the web version as they take the content, strip out all HTML tags then replace all new lines with <br> tags.

Our latest release of PowerPress we released this week you can easily customize your Summary. You can write what you want here with the exact new lines and that is how it will appear on the web and in the traditional iTunes app.

Thanks,
Angelo

@amandato

I’m having this issue as well. I did some more experimentation and wrote up how and why it is happening here.

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/formatting-rss-feed-for-show-notes/

Additionally, I noticed that PowerPress appears to be modifying the tags to remove <p> tags and add <br/> tags instead. I don’t want this to happen. An option to say, “Don’t modify post HTML at all” or something similar would be preferred for those of us who have settled on trying to format it explicitly.