Questions
Difficulties with Apple Podcast Connect validating podcast RSS feed
We are trying to get a podcast into Apple Podcasts, but have encountered a number of roadblocks. We continue to receive an error message from Apple that it can't "read our feed." A few Town News teams have diligently been working on this for us for several weeks, but we're still unable to get it validated. We are using the podcast player on our site.
When we reached out to Apple, they said the reason why it can't validate our feed is because it does not have support for HTTP HEAD requests.
Town News says at this time, it does not believe its the 400 request, partially because it does not allow those requests and it would affect all podcasts.
Has anyone else ran into this/issues with Apple validating an RSS feed generated through Town News? If so, what worked for you?
Answer
Can you share the URL of your RSS feed? I don't know if I'll be able to help, but I'd be happy to look at what the RSS feed has in it and see if there's something that looks different from ours, which does validate.
Absolutely!
Here's what we're working with:
Thank you!
I think the problem may with the URL. I just tried your RSS URL in https://castfeedvalidator.com as you sent, but that didn't validate. Then I replaced all the symbols in it with their HEX values. So the URL became https://www.swnewsmedia.com/podcasts/sports/?q=sports%2Bdummies&nsa=eedition&c%5B%5D=podcasts%2Fsports%2A&t=audio&l=100&s=start_time&sd=desc&f=rss&altf=itunes and that validated. Maybe Apple will like that better too.
Thanks! Apple seems to like that a lot more. It is saying the feed is missing a category tag. It should be sports. Any advice?
Sports does make sense and it looks like a valid category according to Apple's list of categories. Have you tried "Sports" with the capital S. Maybe it's case sensitive.
Hmm.. I did just try capitalizing it, but still getting the same response from Apple: no category tag in the feed, or the category tag is empty.
Did you try the old category name "Sports & Recreation" They may not be supporting the new ones yet.
Rachel, it looks like your section doesn't have spaces around the &. I made a tweak to that on your site. Try seeing if it will validate now.
Excellent. Thanks for the feedback Rachel. I'm going to add a feature request to have the section tag selection be a drop-down instead of a text entry field after seeing how picky Apple is about that.
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Excellent. Thanks for the feedback Rachel. I'm going to add a feature request to have the section tag selection be a drop-down instead of a text entry field after seeing how picky Apple is about that.