Trouble with RSS Feed & iTunes podcast

Your iTunes listing is pulling from this feed: https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed/ While it’s technically possible to use this feed, it’s generally not recommended as this is your WordPress site’s main feed and it’ll contain everything you publish to the site, including blog posts and podcast episodes. iTunes only cares about podcast episodes. It’ll ignore posts without episodes but it still has to process all of the information in the RSS feed, which can lead to problems. You’re using the PowerPress plugin to generate your podcast feed. You’d be better off using the default podcast RSS feed which can be found by logging into your WordPress installation, going to PowerPress >> Settings, Advanced Mode >> Feeds >> Podcast Feeds >> Special podcast only feed. There, you’ll find the URL of your default podcast feed. I highly recommend updating your iTunes listing from the feed you’re using now to your default PowerPress podcast feed. You can find instructions on how to do so here: https://create.blubrry.com/manual/syndicating-your-podcast-rss-feeds/changing-your-podcast-rss-feed-address-url/

To the immediate problem at hand – you say you’ve published 3 podcast episodes but iTunes is only showing 1. Your RSS feed only contains one enclosure item so that’s why there’s only one episode showing in iTunes. Make sure when you publish a podcast episode using PowerPress that you follow all of the steps, including verifying your media URL before saving the post: https://create.blubrry.com/resources/powerpress/using-powerpress/creating-your-first-episode-with-powerpress/

Hi @shawn,

I hope you are well today and thank you for helping on this forum.

Your help here is really appreciated.

Thanks,
Movin

@shawn

Thanks for the reply!

How can you tell that my iTunes is pulling from https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed?

When I access my Blubrry plugin and go to where you told me to (settings>>feeds>>podcast feed>>special podcast feed) it tells me that it is https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed/podcast/. Also, under the iTunes tab in the Blubrry settings it says that https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed/podcast/ is my iTunes subscription URL. Am I not understanding something?

Regarding the 2nd part of your reply, when you told me that my RSS feed has only 1 enclosure item. What exactly do you mean by that? I have gone through all the steps and verified my media URLs. How can you see that my RSS feed has only one enclosure item?

I’m sorry for any technical ability I may be lacking, I’m sure you’re used to dealing with technical retards like me, so i greatly appreciate your patience & expertise!

Ford

I used this tool to determine the feed that’s going to your iTunes listing:
https://reganstarr.com/get-rss-feed-for-itunes-podcast

iTunes uses the feed you (or someone else on your behalf, if it wasn’t you) submitted to the iTunes Store when the show was first added to the store. PowerPress doesn’t control which feed is sent to the iTunes Store. When the show was submitted, it would’ve been better to use the default PowerPress feed at https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed/podcast/ than the one that’s being used now. If you’d like to change it, take a look at this support document:
https://create.blubrry.com/manual/syndicating-your-podcast-rss-feeds/changing-your-podcast-rss-feed-address-url/

I was able to determine how many enclosures you have in your feed by looking at the source code of the feed. There are many ways to do this but I usually do it by going to https://feedvalidator.org/ and copying the feed URL into the feed address box.

@shawn – I literally have no idea how to access my root folder in order to create or modify a .htacess form. My host is GoDaddy.

I have no subscribers to my podcast yet, would it be better just to delete everything and resubmit it? I just am not technical at all and feel like even if I did find my root access folder, I would mess something up by modifying it. Would you be able to tell if I already have a .htaccess file created?

Furthermore, I don’t even know what you’re referring to when you say “enclosure” in my feed. I sure would love to correct what should be a simple thing, but it seems it’s not that straight-forward to someone like me.

thanks once again for your guidance,

Ford

When you create a podcast episode using PowerPress, the plugin adds a “media enclosure” to your RSS feed that tells podcast applications (like iTunes) what and where your media files are, so those files can be downloaded. The number of enclosures in your feed determines how many files are actually available to your subscribers to download.

Go to your PowerPress feed URL in Google Chrome: https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed/podcast/

Go to the Edit menu in Chrome and go to the Find command. Type “enclosure” (without the quote marks) into the Find box and it’ll tell you “1 of 3,” automatically showing you the first enclosure in the feed. This means that your podcast feed has 3 enclosure tags, or 3 total episodes available for subscribers to download right now. As you add more podcast episodes in the future, this number should go up.

Instead of removing your current iTunes Store listing and re-listing with the other feed, you can go here and put in a request with iTunes Podcast support and ask them to update your current listing with the other feed: https://itunespodcasts.zendesk.com/hc/en-us

@shawn

You’re the man for following up with me this many times, and promptly at that.

Thanks for the itunes link – I just submitted a request for them to change my Feed URL to , https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed/podcast/, so we’ll see where that takes me.

Regarding the enclosure items in my feed, you mentioned in the previous message that I have 3 (and I do, I viewed the code in Google Chrome & used the “find” feature like you told me to). That would be one enclosure for each podcast I have, but I still only see 1 podcast in the iTunes listing.

If you look back at this message history, you’ll see that in your first response to me you said I only had 1 enclosure, and that was prob the reason for only 1 episode showing up in iTunes. Has something changed since then? I definitely have 3 now, but still no change.

Thanks so much once again, I feel like I’m getting close to sorting this out – thanks to you and you alone!

Remember that your iTunes Store listing is currently pulling from this feed: https://www.wheresthegringo.com/feed/ which isn’t your PowerPress default feed. This feed still shows only 1 enclosure. That’s why your iTunes Store listing only shows one episode. Hopefully, when Apple gets your listing switched over to the new RSS feed, everything will update properly and continue to do so going forward.

And you’re welcome for the assistance. I work with the Rawvoice/Blubrry support team, the company that makes the PowerPress plugin. I try to help out on this forum as much as I can.

Apple switched the feed and now all 3 are appearing in the itunes directory! Thanks so much for all your help – I couldn’t have done it without you.

Great! Glad you were able to get it sorted out.