What If An RSS Feed Was in A Traffic Jam?

It’s Friday and time to check in again on how NaPodPoMo is going.

Good News/Bad News

Well, the good news is, I’m well on the way to having all 30 episodes recorded and ready to go.

The bad news is, seems my RSS feed is In a traffic jam and should I put all the episodes up, they would not distribute to Aureal/Hive or the megafeed.

The Situation

I am doing my podcast from my wordpress website which means I need to use a podcating plugin to create a hosting environment. I started out with one called Seriously Simple Podcasting. It setup easy, I loved that it used its own posting type which would make it easy to separate from regular blog posts.

The trailer and episode 1 went out great and then things went down hill from there. Without getting into all the gory details, by early this week, it appeared the plugin was in conflict with my Really Simple SSL plugin. That’s a pretty important plugin. At that point I’d been back and forth with the developer numerous times.

I did learn some things in the process, like some details on how to get nicely validated feed, the importantace of ID tags when distributing to directories etc. I decided it was time to part company.

Switching to PowerPress

I’d had another plugin highly recommended, PowerPress by BluBerry. I installed it and found that it wasn’t seeing the podcast type posts SSP had published. I gave it some thought and decided if push came to shove, I’d republish the posts.

So, I proceeded with configuring the plugin. Then I discovered the feed was no longer validating. I combed through the settings and was unable to discover a cause. Some of the error issues I knew for sure were not errors. I also was pretty sure there wasn’t a plugin conflict. One of the settings tells the plugin not to allow changes by other plugins.

I emailed support for PowerPress.

The first thing they suggested was I should migrate the previous episodes and gave me instructions how. Fantastic, more than happy to bring them into the fold. It was a bit time consuming but definitely worth doing so.

While I was doing so, I went through their documentation to make sure I’d properly understood their settings. Once I’d check through that, I tried the feed validation again. No joy.

I sent another email explaining what I’d done and what was happening. I received an email back last evening advising my hosting server was not identifying the feed correctly. It was seeing it as text instead of application/rss+xml. I thought that should be easy to resolve, I’ll contact tech support first thing this morning.

My Support Chat With My Host

I got on chat with support this morning only to be met with, “no nothing wrong here, talk to your web developer”. I explained it’s a wordpress site and no developer.

I also explained the plugin developer has a podcasting hosting company, I have some confidence when they identify a host issue, it’s a host issue.

Got the same response, no problem here, go talk to a web developer.

Back to PowerPress Support

I sent a note back to the plugin support and also asked, what would have changed between the SSP plugin and PowerPress being installed that I would have gone from validating well to errors?

That’s where I’m at, waiting for a response which will likely be later today. In the meantime, I have episodes ready to go that I’ve not posted as I don’t want to add to the traffic jam.

I’d like to get the problem solved. If that doesn’t happen soon, I may just publish to my site and crosspost to Hive. Solving the problem will mean at the end of November, if I decide to carry on podcasting, I’m good to go.

Stay tuned. There will likely be more.

Shadowspub is a writer from Ontario, Canada. She writes on a variety of subjects as she pursues her passion for learning. She also writes on other platforms and enjoys creating books you use like journals, notebooks, coloring books etc.

NOTE: unless otherwise stated, all images are the author’s

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