Plugin Support
Shawn
(@shawnogordo)
Are you getting any specific error from iTunes with the feed? I ran it thru two validators and everything came up fine. One of the validators noted that your iTunes artwork image is very large. It’s an unofficial requirement, but the iTunes Store likes your image size to be no more than maybe 1.5MB. That’s really the only possible problem I can see. If you continue to have trouble with the feed, I’d suggest contacting iTunes support. They should be able to give you some more exact details as to what the issue is:
https://itunespodcasts.zendesk.com/hc/en-us
Okay cool. I’ll have to try and compress that to see it is the cause. Thanks.
Plugin Support
Shawn
(@shawnogordo)
Update: I was informed that 512k is actually the preferred file size. So, if you’ve already tried again with my previous recommendation of 1.5MB and had trouble, try again with the lower setting instead.
Hello
This one seemed odd to me so I did further investigating. I cached your feed on our test server and ran it through the iTunes validator and it was able to read your feed, but it then complained that your iTunes image and the episode files have an issue. To confirm the problem is with your web host, I proceeded to test your feed with the itunes image and latest episode on our test server. Doing this eliminated all validation errors.
The good news is you did everything correctly.
I then tested the iTunes user agent locally accessing your server to see if perhaps your web host is blocking the iTunes user agent. There are no issues. This lead me to discover that your web host is blocking IP addresses.
Digging a little deeper, I think your web host is blocking IP addresses when they do not have reverse pointer records.
The IP address that iTunes uses currently does not have a reverse pointer record. This is confusing and hard to understand, but these are the details your web hosting will need in order to fix the issue.
The next step is to contact your web hosting and see why they are blocking ip addresses that have no reverse pointer record. If they ask for a specific IP, you can site 17.154.84.41, but that IP is not permanent, it is common for Apple to switch IP addresses for their infrastructure so unblocking only one IP address does not necessarily permanently fix your issue.
In the mean time I am contacting Apple to see if they can setup reverse pointer records for their IP addresses.
Thank you so much for looking into this. I will contacting my host and see what they can do to resolve it on their end. I’ll let you know if that does it.
jfitzpatrickmauldin, just to give you an update, Apple has not returned my inquiry about this issue yet. They have been quite swamped in recent weeks so it may take some time before they get back to m e.
Thanks. I checked with my host (which is GoDaddy. smh) and they said this shouldn’t be an issue. I guess I’ll keep trying, hopefully iTunes will fix this soon. I considering making a rss feed myself, but with an issue like this I’m sure any feed is likely to have the same result.
Did you ask GoDaddy if they are blocking IP 17.154.84.41?
Okay, while I am still waiting for a response from Apple, please put in your own support ticket with Apple about the problem. Go to the podcastsconnect.apple.com to sign in then use the contact email link, it will pre-populate the body of the email for you to fill out specifics about your show.
Opened a ticket with iTunes Support and they said everything appears to be working fine. I mentioned the reverse pointer ip and they informed me that shouldn’t be the issue. I am thinking I got someone who didn’t really go that far off the standard questions.
Still not working.
Please email me the ticket/issue number that Apple gave you when you contacted them. I will escalate the issue with our Apple contact. email to cio [at] rawvoice dot com.
Just wanted to report iTunes did finally validate my feed.
http://apple.co/2bnlvty
Thanks for all the help!
Awesome, sorry it took so long. From correspondence I was CC’d on, it appears the iTunes staff was working directly with engineers at Godaddy to fix the issue.
