Yo, iTunes is totally harshing my buzz dudes.
Tuesday, August 30th, 2005I just found out a couple of things. First and foremost, our podcast hosting solution is a little complex. Secondly, Feedburner breaks if your XML has Unicode character 0×1d in there (which we non-geeks recognize as a tab). Thirdly, Slapcast is perfectly okay with a body using tabs in their show notes. Generally I frown on software and service providers who feel the need to protect a user from themselves, so I’m not exactly holding Slapcast responsible, but a friendly warning would have been nice. Nicer would be the ability for me to upload my own .xml file rather than have to use the auto-generated one that Slapcast creates. I’ve spoken with the gentleman who runs Slapcast a couple of times and Roger’s a cool dude so I have faith that someday they might make such a thing possible. It’s not a killer, but it would be cool to have.
Here’s the most important thing I just found out: when it comes to podcasts, iTunes is retarded. It pains me to say this (though I have said it before and this is why I don’t use iTunes for podcast management) because iTunes, when it comes to bringing us subscribers, has been berry berry good to us. About 70% of you nice folks come by way of iTunes. Just for shits and giggles I decided to check our listing on the iTMS, just to make sure that everything was copacetic and found, to my dismay, that the latest show was not there. Now the iTMS is not known for updating rapidly so I did some investigating. This uncovered the problems with Slapcast and Feedburner (problems of my own creation, I take full responsibility for being ignorant) which I promptly fixed.
iTunes still doesn’t work. Click the subscribe button on our page in iTunes and, sure enough, iTunes will subscribe you to Service Industry Night. It just won’t download anything. A little warning icon appears next to our title and, when you click on that, you get the wonderfully helpful message that “The URL does not appear valid.” Great.
Here’s how you make it work:
1. In iTunes, under the “Advanced” menu, select “Subscribe to Podcast…”
2. In the window that pops up, enter: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ServiceIndustryNight
3. Enjoy.
Mind you, this is EXACTLY the same URL that appears in the information window if you try to subscribe to Service Industry Night through the iTMS and end up with the aforementioned broken subscription, so I have no idea what’s going on here, unless iTunes is doing some sneaky redirects or something.
So if you’re subscribed in iTunes and you’re not getting the podcast, try deleting your subscription and re-subscribing manually like I described above. I’ve tried it and, for whatever reason it works. NetNewsWire doesn’t exhibit this behavior, so if I hadn’t have checked I wouldn’t have known.
