Can anyone tell if I have an error in XML?

Question

Our feed has not updated for a couple weeks... validator only (wrongly) shows a need for "explicit" label, for which Dr. Edlund's Fitcast does not qualify. Is there something wrong with our XML file: http://www.doctoredlund.com/vodcast/DrMEfitcast.xml ?
Thanks in advance...

Answer 1

Our feed has not updated for a couple weeks
What exactly do you mean by that? That your iTunes Store page hasn't updated? If you want to see updates more quickly, you can ping the iTMS using this address: https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=259673847 -- this will usually update your page a lot faster than just waiting.
Also, I noticed that your episodes listed in your XML file aren't all in the correct chronological order . . . you should have your oldest episodes at the bottom of the feed, and your newest ones right underneath your <channel> tags (in your case beneath the <itunes:category text="News &amp; Politics"/> tag). Your jumpy episode listings may be causing the iTMS not to pick up some of your episodes.
... validator only (wrongly) shows a need for "explicit" label, for which Dr. Edlund's Fitcast does not qualify.
Validator is not entirely wrong. It is recommended that if you list your podcast in iTunes that you have all of the iTunes tags. The <itunes:explicit> tag is one of them -- but that doesn't mean that your podcast is explicit. There are three categories that you can put in this tag: no, yes, or clean. So if you want your feed to look the same as it always has, just add this tag in your <channel> section (underneath your iTunes image tag would be a good spot):
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
If you want the world to know that your podcast is not explicit in the least, you can add this tag instead: <itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>. This will give you one of those sweet gray "clean" badges next to your title.
So, yeah, add that tag.
Also, you might be interested to know that the reason you are getting the error message +Your feed appears to be encoded as "UTF-8", but your server is reporting "US-ASCII"+ . . . it's because you need to escape all of your single and double quotes into code: ' = &apos; and " = &quot; (note that this just applies to text fields like the words in your title and description, and nothing in the body of the <tags> themselves). But this is not an absolutely necessary fix, and your feed should work fine even if you don't fix your single and double quotes.