Buzz Out Loud Lounge: BOL feed wonkiness as of late

BOL feed wonkiness as of late

by raygun01  - 7/25/09 4:30 PM

Alright. I'm so incredibly peeved right now that... well, if I could use a stronger word than "peeved" I would in these forums. But I can't. So I won't.

First of all, I'm sorry that the feed seems absolutely unstable lately.

Secondly, I wish I could say "here's the reason." But I simple don't know what the root of the issue is.

Basically I am publishing this podcast in the very same way I've been doing it for nearly two years now and over the past two weeks the following has happened nearly every day without fail:

I publish BOL after the show.
I log into iTunes, refresh the feed.
Today's episode appears in my iTunes and proceeds to download to my computer successfully.
I walk away thinking my job is done (as it always has been at this point in the past).
I find out anywhere from 6hrs-24hrs later that a bunch of people never got the podcast.
I freak out and yell obscenities.
Stacey looks at me weird.
I log into our blog platform (that our podcasts all get published from) and scan the post for any ampersand coded characters that might be hiding in there and replace them with their real world characters. (I know some podcatchers don't like those characters)
I republish.
I log into iTunes and clear out my subscription, then resubscribe to the feed.
Today's episode once again downloads correctly for me.
Everyone's happy cause they *finally* get it too. (usually... but sometimes I still find out its disappeared again)

See, the problem here is... the whole thing about my removing those characters in the blog post? I do that every day before I ever publish the flipping podcast to begin with. So why then do I log in later and find them in the post again? I have to then ask myself "did I miss em the first time around?" And EVEN IF I DID miss them, why in the H did it d/l successfully for me in iTunes if those characters render iTunes (or other podcatchers) useless???

YYYYYYYAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

(sigh)

Now I'm getting reports of people only finding a 2kb SWF file as the attachment for yesterdays show. Again, why the H did the actual MP3 file d/l correctly for me if it's not for others?????? I. just. don't. get it.

In the case of this morning, yes Saturday morning, I awoke to tweets of people not getting the show, open iTunes to make sure it's definitely not there for me too (which it wasn't... queue screaming)...open the blog entry, make the changes that I only *think* might have anything to do with this issue, republish, and the show then appears and d/l's for me in iTunes. Problem solved?

Not too fast, slick. Problem not solved. Get back from CostCo to find out that it's not in the feed... again... even though it was... again.

I'm p*ssed. And I just don't know what to do. So let's look at the potential snags in the chain:

BTO - our blog platform. I publish the blog post with the filename of the episode. This creates the RSS that the podcast subscription is based around.

Feedburner - The RSS from the blog post is fed into each show's own entry in our Feedburner acct which we use to pretty-fy the feed... Add the image to it, Title, description of show... part of Feedburner does the thing where it scans the feed entry and when it detects a MP3 file link, it assumes its a podcast and adds the appropriate tags so podcatchers can recognize the new episode.

Servers - I don't need to tell you that I've had a long battle with stability of our servers and how we distribute media out to the world in the past. But lately, they've been extremely dependable. Plus, this wouldn't explain why my changing a blog post and re-upping it would make any difference to the podcatchers out there.

You guys - Nope. This isn't one of those "everyone else has the problem" things. It's obviously a problem on our end somehow. BUT, I do know that some people are getting the episodes and some people are not. That could be answered by people having their podcatchers open and listening for new episodes the minute I hit publish (because as you remember, I d/l it successfully on my end... mybe they are d/ling it then too...)

I'm all ears for suggestions, guys. Because I am simply sick of this.

Now, time to get back to staring at the blog post to see what I missed. I'd bet a million drm-laden music files that I do nothing, republish the blog post, and suddenly its fixed. THAT'S how much sense this all makes.

Thanks.