Back to podcasting basics: Validating your feed

When I first started podcasting, I was concerned about my RSS feed and whether it was valid, especially for iTunes. Fortunately, there's a handy tool called Feed Validator that can flag problems in your feed. (Of course, you have to know how to fix them!) If you're using the combination of TypePad and Feedburner, as I am, the whole feed business is actually pretty straightforward.

Most of the time.

Yesterday I posted episode 74 of the Trafcom News Podcast. I was pleased with the interviews in it, and eager to get it online, so I did my usual series of steps after editing and mixing:

• edited my ID3 tags
• uploaded the MP3 file to Libsyn
• uploaded my show notes to my podcast blog
• uploaded my short blog post on this blog
• clicked on all the links to make sure everything worked.

So I was done. Or so I thought.

Later in the day, Corey Taratuta, who produces the Irish Fireside Podcast, sent me an email to say that he had seen my blog post, but that my podcast wasn't yet available in iTunes. Thinking that iTunes was slow, I pinged them. (If you don't know how to do this, read these simple instructions.) Still no go. Then I noticed that the Blubrry player on my site and on the Blubrry site wasn't featuring my latest episode either.

So I went back to basics and validated my feed. I couldn't remember the last time I'd validated it. For months and months, I had really forgotten about the good ol' feed.  Well, after running Feed Validator, I discovered an error in my code. A very silly mistake: an extra space in the file name for my MP3 file. It was odd because you could still click on the link and retrieve the MP3 file, but iTunes and Blubrry didn't like the invalid feed. So I quickly fixed it and thought everything was fine.

But the podcasting gods were conspiring against me (and every other podcaster on TypePad!). Today either TypePad or Feedburner experienced some kind of outage that caused my feed to run all of two lines. That's a little short!

The fix is now in progress. By the time you read this, all should be well.

Lesson one learned: Always validate your feed!

Lesson two learned: Podcasting friends are terrific because they look out for each other. Thanks, Corey!

Comments

[Jason Van Orden]

Sorry to hear about your TypePad whoahs. Another lesson...subscribe to your own feed and check it yourself, at least in iTunes, shortly after publishing.

Granted, you may have done this and you would have no way to know in the case that the outage happened awhile after you published. So thank goodness for helpful listeners. I always appreciate when someone takes the time to say something.

Great episode by the way. Your teaser at the end of the show notes about Chris Penn and his Google News tip clinched me. I had to download right away--excellent snippet of copy!

[Donna Papacosta]

Thanks for commenting, Jason. Glad you liked the podcast.

Good advice. I DO subscribe to all my own feeds (plus my own show in iTunes), so I would have discovered the problem. It's just that my listeners were onto the glitch before I was!