iTunes Dilemma

Good Morning!

Recently one of our customers brought to us a problem and asked if we had seen this situation before. They were using a RSS feed proding service and when they tried to publish their blog to iTunes, it picked any and all enclosures that they had in the blog. All the wanted was their podcasts. After many hours of reading posts on iTunes support forum boards, other automated RSS feed providers boards and Google search, we discovered that the customers podcast blog was a sub-directory of the main blog and that automated RSS feed generators were not sophisticated enough or designed to handle this situation.

But I had also read that podcasts, when submitted to iTunes, were not showing up for days/weeks or sometimes at all. So I decided to do a test. Our company provides a podcast recording and hosting service. We also record podcasts for our customers use. I took a podcast we had recorded, manually generated a RSS XML sheet and submitted it to iTunes. Admittedly I had a few errors in it. It took me a bit to find a reference to the iTunes specific tags. Here is the link I found so you don't have to look: http://phobos.apple.com/static/iTunesRSS.html
After getting it to pass Itunes RSS feed validation, I waited for it to appear in their directory. That was Wednesday and behold, this morning, Friday, it was there. A 2 day turnaround?

So here is my 2 cents worth. I understand that some folks are not html/xml savy and that they may have to use some of the automated services to generate their RSS feed XML, but newer isn't always better. When a process is automatically generated, it limits you to what that service thinks is important. There is less flexability. That's why I prefer the older ways sometimes. The web is full of information on how to accomplish things like this. And instead of jumping on the latest greatest new fangled service to pop up, I will continue to use the methods that work. Period.

A BIG thumbs up to the support staff at Feedburner. They were all over this and offered helpful suggestions in a timely manner. They weren't always able to fix the situation, but they acknowledged that fact and were helpful in finding solutions.

As for iTunes, Thumbs Down. I noticed very poor support board monitoring. Also the disclaimer for their service basically says, Use us, but forget about any help with your problems.

If you are still having problems getting your podcasts to publish on iTunes, shoot me an email and I will see what I can do to help.