Once again I screwed things up and I’m not sure how to fix it. I successfully created the hiking podcast. You can find the feed at thecasualhike.com/tchpodcast.xml. I added it to podcastindex.org and everything was hunky dory.
But, a problem cropped up where the index showed there were two episodes instead of only one. One was correct with the episode title, art, and description. The other was labeled as “New Episode” with no information. Both episodes, the correct and incorrect ones, would play the first episode. I parsed the xml file for my RSS feed and there was only one <item> tag. I could not figure out what happened or why the erroneous episode showed up.
Like the genius I am I thought maybe I need to re-publish my feed so it as a new <pubDate> value, ping the index to tell it the feed needs to be updated, and magically the problem would be solved. That didn’t do it. The problem persisted. Then I had the super genius idea to again re-publish my feed to get a new <pubDate> value, remove the xml file for my RSS feed from my server, ping the index so it would find nothing, then put the xml file back where it belongs and ping the index again so it would find the feed. All that did was end up removing the entire podcast from the index.
I sent an e-mail to Dave Jones at podcastindex.org about my issue but have not yet received a reply. I really hate bugging them because these are just my experiments and are not vitally important to anyone but me. I don’t know if there is something Dave has to do to fix my screw up or if I should just submit the podcast as a new podcast to the index and start over.
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