From time to time we get support requests related to podcasters’ RSS feeds. We handle a lot of feeds here at Blubrry. We handle over a thousand feeds and that number is growing everyday. So from time to time people have issues with their feed updating and we’re glad to help with that. Sometimes we learn something new and we’re able to tweak the system to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. And sometimes the issues are ‘one off’ types of things that no system fix can handle.
We want you to know that we take your content seriously as well. And we want to give everyone a fair shake vis-a-vis exposure on the shows page. So in order to do that we add each item in your feed into a database and record the time when it was added to our system. This allows us to keep things in the order in which they were published to the original feeds. And it ensures that the changing of a date in a feed doesn’t mean that a particular episode gets a second shot at the being on the top of the episode page.
Some folks have expressed concern about their feeds being ‘hijacked’ by Blubrry. To be clear, we would define hijacking as taking an RSS feed and creating a shadow feed (with a different address) that we would then link to instead of your original feed. We don’t do that. Nor do we capture your podcast media files and cache them. All media is delivered from your original host. For the moment we are a second point of presence for your podcast. You have the ability to tweak your profile to point visitors to your primary presence, iTunes, Odeo or Yahoo! Podcasts.
At the moment we don’t have the ability to let you change your RSS feed at will. We’re working on adding that feature to the system. For the moment if you would like to change your feed then contact us and we’ll help you out with that. And if you’re having problems with your feed updating we suggest that you check the validity of the feed by heading over to www.feedvalidator.org.
We understand that your content is very important. We’re podcasters too so we know the effort that you’re putting out. As such, we’re going to continue working the make the process of updating your content as efficient and accurate as possible.