"this feed has no episodes" error when submitting to iTunes

Question

Hey there,
This is probably a simple fix but I can't seem to figure it out as I am very new to this. My link is here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/VolumizePodcast
When I submit this link to iTunes it says "this feed has no episodes"
Any ideas?

Answer 1

Firstly, your feed is all on one line with no line breaks: this makes it very difficult to read. I was able to get round this by automatically inserting a line break after every >, but it would be better to write the feed with breaks. It doesn't affect the validity, but it makes it much easier to troubleshoot.
Episodes are contained within the <item> and </item> tags: there are two such tags in your feed. For iTunes the actual media file is references within the <enclosure> tag within the <item> tag. Your second <item> has no enclosure tag at all. The first has a tag:
<enclosure url="http://djaaronjoseph.adej.net/volumize_podcast.xml" length="1997" type="application/xml" />
but as you see it is referencing another feed file, so iTunes will not see it as an episode.
The feed it references does contain an enclosure tag with a media file, though the name of the file contains spaces (replaced with %20 in the feed) which it shouldn't. It validates at http://www.feedvalidator.org but does not contain an iTunes category tag. The feed you listed in your post does not validate.
If you submit the feed at http://djaaronjoseph.adej.net/volumize_podcast.xml to iTunes it will probably be accepted, but you need to do more work on it first.
You might care to look at this page, which gives a sample feed and a basic description of how to set up a podcast:
http://www.wilmut.org.uk/pc
and also Apple's rather more detailed tech note:
http://www.apple.com/itunes/whatson/podcasts/specs.html
I might add that Feedburner is notorious for writing messy feeds, and that you would always do better to submit a feed directly to iTunes rather than letting Feedburner do it.