Podcast episodes not showing up in iTS

Question

We have recently changed our URL. We were able to successfully publish episode 4 with the redirect but for some reason episode 5 never showed up. episode6 is now up and we need these to show up in the store.
FEED URL:
http://www.texastribune.org/feeds/podcasts/the-tribcast/
subscriptions are updating just fine. Episode 5 was updated last week. I've manually pinged the server.

Answer 1

Firstly, to clarify the situation with iTunes. When you submit a podcast feed URL to iTunes it caches the feed (updating it periodically) and displays the contents in the Store page. When you click 'Subscribe', the Store directs the iTunes application to the feed - this is now a direct connection and doesn't involve the Store (you could say the Store acts as an agent). The same result can be obtained by subscribing manually from the 'Advanced' menu.
It's possible to get into a situation where the iTunes application can read a feed but the Store can't - often this is caused by a redirect script which the application and browsers can understand but the Store doesn't, so when people change the feed to one using this the subscriptions will update but the Store page stays with the cached version of the old feed.
Something like this may have happened here. Your feed URL is given as
http://www.texastribune.org/feeds/podcasts/the-tribcast/
The slash on the end of a URL usually means that what precedes it is a folder name, and that the file which is brought up is called index.html which browsers will display automatically in this situation. In your case, if one control-clicks on the URL and downloads the file you get a text file called the-tribcast.rss. This file is valid in itself -the actual XML seems to be OK - but if you open the URL in FireFox and choose 'Page Source' from the 'View' menu it displays the feed as pure text without colouring the tags (which it would normally do with an XML file).
If you open the downloaded feed in FireFox it displays the contents but warns 'This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it'.
All this means that although FireFox and the iTunes application are able to recognize the feed as a feed and parse it correctly, the iTunes Store isn't doing so. Possibly the incomplete URL is confusing it - do you have some sort of redirect in place which takes browsers to the actual file, but which the Store cannot understand? Otherwise possibly the server is telling the Store that the file is text, rather than XML, though normally in this case FeedValidator would pick this up, which it doesn't.
Whatever the cause, you now have a Catch-22 situation: the Store isn't reading your feed, and so isn't updating; and you cannot change the Store to a new feed because to do so requires it to be able to read the existing feed.
Unless you can modify the feed or the way the server presents it without affecting the URL which the Store is looking for you have two not very satisfactory options:
1. You can abandon this feed, and submit a completely new feed to the Store. You will need to change the name of the podcast slightly or you will be told it already exists. If you do this you should make sure that the feed URL is a complete one including the actual filename. It's probably better to use the extension .xml rather than .rss (although the latter should work).
2. You can get the Store to remove the feed and then resubmit with the same title. (You should still use a new and complete feed URL). The removal process is detailed here:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/specs.html#removing
Expect the process to take some days. A previous poster with a similar problem was initially told just to use the 'block' tag but this is no good to you as iTunes isn't reading the feed, but he did eventually get a manual removal and if you don't you will need to pursue it.