I think that I have found a bug in iTunes!
My buddy Victor Cajiao over at the Typical PC User Podcast had some funkiness going on with his feed. On Saturday he posted a show (See “Before” image) once iTunes downloaded it, iTunes would change the subscribed to feed from his feedburner address to the last enclosure URL (See “After” image). This was a problem because you would not get anymore updates from him because the URL for the MP3 was not a valid XML file! (See “After-After” image) …and therefore a bunch of iTunes users were not subscribed any longer.
I tried several fixes including upgrading his WordPress to 2.0 and a lot of other hair-brained fixes..the problem was there was an open link tag in a previous posts show notes (Kudos to Blaine McDonnell for catching that). Of course this is not right…but I think that this kicked off a bug in iTunes that changed the subscription URL.
There is a directive that you can put in your feed to point everyone to a new feed…but it shouldn’t do that unless it explicitly sees it. So podcasters be aware! Close all the tags in your Show Notes! (Which is good advice for anything really)
*Update* Apparently the podcast guys at Apple got back to us and said that they had seen this before as a rare problem…and are looking to fix that…Awesome!
BEFORE:
AFTER:
AFTER-AFTER:
