Have You Checked Your iTunes Listing Lately? You Should!
UPDATE: I’ve posted a fix for this problem here.
Your listing in the iTunes podcast directory may not be up to date. You might want to quickly check and then come back to this post.
As of writing this, Internet Business Mastery is on episode #29, but the last one listed in the iTunes directory is #25. We’ve received e-mail from people who thought that our podcast had faded out. I know of other podcasts having the same problem.
I may have ferreted out the cause: FeedBurner’s FeedSmith plugin for WordPress. FeedSmith forwards your WordPress RSS feed to your FeedBurner feed. When a user accesses the main Internet Business Mastery feed:
http://www.internet-based-business-mastery.com/feed
…the plugin forwards him over to:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/ibm
That way everyone gets the same version of the feed and we get more complete stats.
The forwarding works fine. The problem is that the type of forwarding being used by FeedSmith seems cause problems when iTunes comes knocking. I’m currently testing this theory.
I’ve disabled the FeedSmith plugin on the Internet Business Mastery blog and implemented a different kind of redirect. For the geeks reading, FeedSmith uses a 307 redirect. I’ve switched over to a 302 redirect (which has worked with iTunes in the past).
I’ve pinged iTunes to get them to update my listing as soon as possible. I’ll watch to see if this fixes things. I also posted my hypothesis on this FeedBurner Forum thread where others are discussing the issue.
I’d like to know if anyone else has a feed that is not updating in the iTunes podcast directory. If so, are you using the FeedSmith plugin? Please share your experience in the comments to help bring this issue to a resolution.
July 10th, 2007 18:45
Our feed comes from Libsyn where our podcasts are hosted. I route everything through feedburner and although our site is powered by wordpress, I opted not to use the plugin. However once in a while, our feed does not update. We haven’t figured out why.
July 10th, 2007 19:59
I’ve only just set up my podcast, but I have noticed that I can’t get iTunes to fully update my feedburner feed. It will update everything but the cover art. I changed the podcast image (including changing the file name), checked from feedburner that the new image was the one designated in Smartcast, and pinged iTunes. It’s been several weeks, and yet the podcast image in the iTunes store is still the old one. Not sure if this problem with iTunes updates is related or not. I don’t use Wordpress, but Blogger.
July 10th, 2007 21:22
My podcast is updating fine at iTunes…. but I am also having trouble with iTunes updating by cover art.
I changed the name of the art and resubmitted to feedburner. It looks fine at feedburner but it has been over 2 weeks and still no change at iTunes.
Support at iTunes said I should change my RSS feed to reflect the new cover art. Duh. I have already done that. I do use Wordpress, FeedSmith and Podpress.
Any suggestions?
July 11th, 2007 11:59
@Kira,
Another reason that your listing might not update is if your feed does not validate. Have you checked that? You can use http://www.feedvalidator.org to check it.
@Judy & THAT,
The one thing that iTunes has not updated for Internet Business Mastery is the album art. I figured they must check and change it less often, but you say it has been several weeks for you. That is disconcerting. I’ll have to look into that some more.
July 14th, 2007 16:35
Thanks, Jason and THAT… I’m glad to know that others have noticed the same thing. I did validate the feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/walkingwithwordsworth) and feedvalidator reported “This feed is valid, but may cause problems for some users. We recommend fixing these problems.:
line 2 [This is a link to part of http://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%2Fwalkingwithwordsworth , column 0: description should not contain onblur attribute (5 occurrences)”
I use blogger and feedburner. Line 2 etc is generated by blogger for postings that contain images. However, the cover art is not part of blogger, but rather information supplied as part of Smartcast in Feedburner, as far as I understand. The podcast seems to work fine as such, except that the cover art doesn’t update in the iTunes store after changing the image & filename in Smartcast. Hope that sheds some light on the problem.
December 27th, 2007 09:35
My feed has not been updated by the iTunes store since 6 days now. Not sure what is going on. I point my feeds to feedburner directly (http://feeds.thedigitalmediadude.com/DailyTip). I ran the feed through Feed Validator and it says it’s ok, however, it brought up a warning about the Springbox DTD, could that be causing it? I Have a springbox widget turned on at the feed in feedburner.
Thanks!
- Marcelo
The Digital Media Dude
December 27th, 2007 22:31
I’m doing the admin work for my mother’s blog, http://www.teachersatrisk.com and she’s been having problems with her podcast not updating on iTunes. However, she’s not using Feedburner or the plug-in you mention in your fix.
December 29th, 2007 03:42
@Marcelo,
It is worth disabling the plugin to see if that remedies the problem.
@Lisa,
Trying running your feed through http://www.feedvalidator.org to see if you have any errors or warnings that could be causing the problem.