WordPress.com

1. jgelements
   Member
   Mar 24, 2011, 2:29 AM

   Forgive my ignorance, please, but I have been searching support and the forums, even Google, and have not yet found an answer or a solution to my situation.

   I am trying to submit a feed to iTunes for a podcast that I have recently created. When I submit feed://abstractpod.wordpress.com/feed/ to Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast within iTunes, it can't find any contents. It errs, saying, "There are no playable episodes for "The ABSTRACT Podcast".
   The URL might point to text-only episodes, or contain file types that iTunes cannot play." But I have three podcasts already published on my free WordPress.com blog, http://abstractpod.wordpress.com. Each podcast has the audio embed tag, and it plays the .mp3 files just fine. Plus, I have included an explicit link directly to each file for download along with the embedded file. I am hosting the podcasts on my Mobileme account in a public folder and each item is shared. I have not paid for any WordPress.com upgrades. My goal is to successfully drive a podcast without paying for upgrades.

   What am I missing? How should I be attempting to publish the podcasts successfully on WordPress.com with the intention of submitting it to iTunes? Is it possible without the WordPress.com upgrades?

   Thank you in advance for your feedback.

   The blog I need help with is abstractpod.wordpress.com.

2. jgelements
   Member
   Mar 24, 2011, 4:09 AM

   I believe the solution was to use Feedburner.

3. raincoaster
   Member
   Mar 24, 2011, 5:01 AM

   Well, the URL you submitted is the blog URL, not the podcast URL. You need the URL for the podcasts, I believe that's the category link.

4. jgelements
   Member
   Mar 24, 2011, 5:03 AM

   I am ignorant in this matter--what is the difference between a blog and a podcast? Are they not similar, except one is text based and the other audio? What do you mean by category? I have multiple categories set up for my 3 existing episodes. Are you suggesting to create one category called "podcast" and use the feed for said category to submit to iTunes?

5. thesacredpath
   Member
   Mar 24, 2011, 5:33 AM

   iTunes has to see the exact feed URL to where the podcast link is located. So, if you put your podcasts into a category named "podcasts" then the URL that iTunes needs would be:

   http://abstractpod.wordpress.com/category/podcast/feed/

   Note that I started the URL with http:// and not feed:// ? That is because the actual URL starts with http:// and then will resolve to feed:// after clicked, but you can't initially use the feed:// .

   One unrelated note: You are using too many tags and will get excluded from the wordpress.COM global tags pages, which can be a good source of visitors. You should have at most 10 tags per post. Search engines also get suspicious when they see lots of tags on posts and it can affect your search engine ranking.

6. jgelements
   Member
   Mar 24, 2011, 5:35 AM

   Kind sir, thank you for your constructive criticism.

7. raincoaster
   Member
   Mar 24, 2011, 6:06 AM

   Oh, I didn't even notice the prefix. Yes, everything to do with feeds and URLs has to be EXACT and painstaking.

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