Feed troubles
Posted by Raven on 15 Apr 2009 at 11:00 pm | Tagged as: Announcements
Hello Metamorphs!
Chris here. For the last couple of months I’ve been receiving repeated emails from my loyal listeners about problems with the RSS feed for Metamor City. Episodes failed to download, or stopped in the middle, or only downloaded after many, many retries. Clearly something was wrong, yet my hosting service insisted that everything was working fine on their end.
Now I believe we have found the culprit. The problems appeared shortly after Google bought out Feedburner and compelled me to transfer the feed over to my Google account. Apparently Google has been redirecting the feed to their own archived copies of the show, which has been … less than efficient. I can’t imagine why such a change was made without informing us, the users, much less without giving us a way to opt out of it. I have tested the original, native RSS feed (http://www.metamorcity.com/?feed=podcast) and found that it functions normally; only the Feedburner feed was suffering from the timeout errors.
To make a long story short, I have deleted the Feedburner feed and redirected its traffic back to the original feed. iTunes has been notified of the change and should make the changeover seamlessly for most, if not all, subscribers. While I am sad to lose Feedburner’s stat-tracking abilities, it is a small price to restore the confidence of my listeners and ensure higher-quality service for all of you.
If you have been inconvenienced by the recent feed troubles, I sincerely apologize, and I thank you for sticking with me. Special thanks to all of you who have made the effort to notify me about your problems in downloading the episodes. Hopefully this will fix the situation, but if it doesn’t, please let me know.
Keep it on the bright side,
Chris
Stumble it!
iTunes is still using the feedburner link; I unsubscribed then resubscribed via itunes and it failed on me unfortunately.
Hi Jagash,
Yes, iTunes still has the wrong RSS feed in their directory, even though I’ve told them to fix it. You can, however, use the correct RSS feed to manually subscribe in iTunes; either click on the button on the webpage, or use the “Subscribe to a Podcast” in the Advanced menu and enter the feed address (http://www.metamorcity.com/?feed=podcast).
While it is working partially in that feed, it is still timing out on some of the downloads. The problem seems to come and go for me.
Tried downloading it with Miro and iTunes with the new feed and still no joy. I blame it on the vampire syndicate.
[...] Feed Troubles: Metamor City Podcast "For the last couple of months I’ve been receiving repeated emails from my loyal listeners about problems with the RSS feed for Metamor City. Episodes failed to download, or stopped in the middle, or only downloaded after many, many retries. Clearly something was wrong, yet my hosting service insisted that everything was working fine on their end. [...]
Just heard the first two episodes of your wonderful podcast. I was instantly hooked. Unfortunately, those are the only two episodes that seem all right. I use itunes and have written them of the problem. I hope the problem is quickly resolved. I cannot wait to hear the rest of your imaginative story.
if you are re-downloading it and you have itunes set up to do muil-downloads only get 2 esp at a time it should go smoother. and I had no problems with it
thanks-I’ll try that!
Still wouldn’t take…I guess I’ll just wait and see if the problem corrects itself…
iTunes wont update, claims it can’t find the server. Call Artax, he can fix everything.
The fix outlined by Raven 4/17: Click Advanced menu (in iTunes) and paste the web address into the Subscribe to podcast window. It works
Which address? Not http://www.metamorcity.com/?feed=podcast , or am I wrong?
FionaFan – Yep, that’s the address you put into iTunes. Paste that in and it should subscribe you with no problem.
Thank you so much for the input I just downloaded the episodes. I am quite excited to start listening.
lol Vamp73 I thought that was what you did lol when I gave you my advice
New link works perfectly. Advanced refers to the menu bar at the top of the screen by the way.
*sigh* I just started having problems with the feed, so I switched to the new feed… deleting all the back log that I haven’t listened to yet… but the new feed isn’t working for me at all. Fortunately, I have a back up… but I hope the feed gets fixed soon.
Uk Itunes shop is broken and i’ve tried to subscribe again using the link and it won’t work
30 seconds after I made the above post I tried the link again and it worked fine lol.
ITunes US is still not working properly, new episode does not show up in the ITunes Store listing, nor can ITunes find the feed.
Still having difficulty with iTunes US being able to find the feed.
Like Rem, after retrying with the new link and getting iTunes to shape up, I got the most recent episode.
Thanks Raven!
Just so whoever comes next doesn’t have to search, this is the link:
The fix outlined by Raven 4/17:
Click Advanced menu (in iTunes) and paste the web address into the Subscribe to podcast window.
http://www.metamorcity.com/?feed=podcast
I was wondering why I’d not had any more episodes recently (last one to come down to my podcatcher program was MCP39.
Makes sense now.
Though I had to effectively add another feed to subscribe to this ‘new’ podcast.
Trying to subscribe with Rhythmbox in Ubuntu Linux and it can’t parse your feed, is there anywhere else to get the REST of the story?