Why Did It Have to be Mimes? (Shakes Fist)

I’ll freely admit the the first reason the Edge Cases podcast isn’t on iTunes is because I forgot to submit it on Sunday night.

But the second reason is more interesting. When we first tried to submit our Feedburner feed¹ to iTunes, Apple sent us an email a few minutes later saying, sorry, there had been an error. But they didn’t tell us what error.

Feed Validator was more helpful, but only to a point. It told us that we should use UTF-8 encoding if we wanted to submit to iTunes. But we were specifying UTF-8 in our RSS file. It turned out, FeedBurner would only respect that setting if the RSS file MIME type was properly set to text/xml, which ours was decidedly not. Instead, it was—oops!—set to image/jpeg. (Hilarity did indeed ensue.)

So we fixed that, and Feed Validator said we were good, and we submitted again. Bzzzt. Another email from Apple saying there was an unspecified problem.

After another hilarity break, it occurred to us that if there was a problem with the MIME type for one of the files, maybe there were problems with some of the other files as well. Y’know, unimportant ones, like the MP3 files.² Yup, they were also set to image/jpeg. Once we changed them, the feed was accepted by Apple.

And now it’s in…moderation, I guess? I wonder if it’s the same folks who review the apps….

 

1. Which in the meantime you can use directly in iTunes, by the way. Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast… -> paste in the feed URL.

2. I suppose it could have been the logo file, which was a PNG file, not a JPEG file, but I’m dubious. And I’m not resubmitting in order to find out.