“To discover that though the feed is valid, it is not being recognized by feed readers because of the following:“
Have you had problems getting your feed recognized because of this? Note this ‘error’ is due to the addition of the “Best practices profile” for RSS that was just released last month:
http://feedvalidator.org/news/archives/2007/10/15/rss_best_practices.html
That specific error represents little at this time. Most syndication readers will not have been updated to reflect the new recs. And it’s likely most developers will see the requirement of an atom:link reference in an RSS2 feed as superfluous.
Kafkaesqui, thanks so much to your respond to my post here! Actually, I had my podcast feeds going to over 20 directories since November 2006. Then all of a sudden, which would be 2 weeks ago, they all stop working. My feeds are now just showing up in 3 of the 20 that they use to. So, technically, I have not had problems before now.
Today, I just received the message below from Podtrac’s tech support team, regarding why their player that is installed on my site quit uploading all of my feeds:
Subject: Player
Dear Marlive,
Thank you for your patience. It took some time to track down the problem. We can’t get your player to load either. While that was immediately evident, it took awhile to understand what was missing. Your feed is valid. Usually when the player will not operate, it is because the feed is not valid. This was not your case. We researched some more, looking at your feed source and discovered why the player will not load. It is because you do not have any <enclosure url> tags in your feed. The player uses this information to load your feed. The lack of <enclosure url> tags in your feed is also causing your measurement problems.
I’ve been using PodPress to upload all of my podcast to my blog for almost a year. I did upgrade to the newest version of PodPress about 3 months ago and everything was working fine and now it is not. How do I handle the <enclosure url> they are talking about above with regards to the PodPress works?
Again, I appreciate your feedback!
Marlive
Otto42, THANK YOU so much for sending that link.
So upgrading to the latest version of WordPress 2.3.1 should take care of my problems, correct? Or should I just go ahead and correct my current feed with the line of code shown at – http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5205?
Marlive
WordPress handles enclosures automatically. This makes them difficult to debug.
Did you recently start doing anything differently? I see you’re using PodTrac redirection on the MP3 links, is that new?
Anything that you might be doing differently now than from when it was working.
You can fix the atom:link problem with that fix I gave you before, but it has nothing to do with enclosures.
Otto42, I just applied the 2 lines of code you did in the fixed version. I revalidated the feed and my Missing atom issues seem to have gone away. Now I will see if this solved my feed issues among all the various players out there. Thank you!
Marlive
Otto42, thank you for letting me know that WordPress handles enclosures automatically. I’ve added that bit of information in my email response back to PodTrac support just now.
I can honestly say that I have not done anything new with my podcasts that would be causing the issues I’m having other than my upgrade to the latest version of PodPress; which I’ve upgraded to other current versions of that software without having any problems.
The PodTrac redirection link you see is not new for me either and is actually the service that I’ve been using since February 2007 to track the performance of my podcast worldwide and how I’m paired with interested advertisers. PodTrac thought there was some complications with their redirect link — and now that I’ve corrected my Missing atom issues with that fix link you sent — I am going to have them recheck the issues on their end again to be sure that in fact it is that redirect link that is causing my problems.
Again thanks for your help. You and this entire support network is AWESOME!
Marlive
Well, to be fair, I didn’t say that enclosures were *working* on your site. Looking at your feed shows that they clearly are not. I just said that it normally handles enclosures automatically. Something is not letting it do that, because you clearly don’t have any enclosures in your feed. So PodTrac is correct as far as that goes.
I can explain how enclosures normally work though…
When you make a post, you generally make links to things in that post. For a Podcast, you’re probably linking to an MP3. After you make the post, WordPress will look at the content of the post and find any links that it can understand. It will attempt to retrieve the header part of these links from the webserver. In doing that, the webserver will give it the MIME type of the links. If the MIME type is video/* or audio/*, it will make a note that the file is an enclosure. It does this by making a custom data field entry on the post with the file details (mime type, size, etc). Then, when the feed is generated, this custom field causes the enclosure tag to be made.
The fact that you don’t have any enclosure tag therefore points out one of these:
1. WordPress has not checked for enclosures (possible if wp-cron isn’t working right).
2. WordPress checked the links but didn’t get a good MIME type back from them.
3. WordPress did everything right, but the custom field data got lost somewhere.
I also notice that you’re using FeedBurner. FeedBurner can create enclosure links automatically too, you might try having it do that as a stopgap measure.
Also note that PodPress itself has been known to mess around with enclosure tags too. Double check to see if PodPress is still activated, one of the new things in WordPress is that it automatically deactivates plugins that cause any sort of problems. This sometimes takes people by surprise when it happens.
Hi Otto42,
I’ve tried to register on the podpress (mighty seek) forum, however the image validator isn’t working so i can’t complete registration. So I was hoping that you could help me too.
iTunes is telling me that my podpress feed doesn’t have any episodes and I am guessing that this is an enclosure problem. Here is what i have done so far…
Have placed video file in blog (http://www.cyclevox.com/pod/)
I want to add to itunes:
Validation of the default feed (http://www.cyclevox.com/pod/?feed=podcast) gives me a Missing atom:link with rel=”self” error
itunes says that feed has no episodes
I tested feed in normal browser and it seemed to work fine
WordPress version: 2.3.3
Podpress version: 8.8
Please can you shed some light.
This is the EXACT problem I am having. EXACTLY. Has anyone responded? I’m so upset by this. Our only difference is that my site is brand new — but the end result is exact….
