You get what you pay for! The dramas of free hosting and feed services

If anyone has been following me on twitter, you have been following my month long mini rants against my hosting and feeds. If not let me fill you in!

For the entire month of March (and perhaps as far back as into February) none of my podcasts have been posting properly. I wasn't aware of the problem as from my end, everything looked like it was going up fine. It was only when a listener asked where the shows were that I discovered that neither iTunes nor Sticher had been getting the shows from the feeds properly. Three shows total were impacted and looked like they didn't exist. (Battle Pets with Alludra and Kephas episodes 17-19)

This is, to say the least, problematic. You see, I work hard to make sure these shows are out regularly, and to find that some were a month behind on updating, well that's just embarrassing! All my hard work to edit and post the shows on a regular time table has been disrupted due to a problem with either my feeds or my hosting.

The providers in question are Feedburner and Archive.org. First Feedburner wasn't posting any posts, and I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and working on it, figuring it to be the worst culprit as the future of Feedburner seems uncertain. I straightened all that out and went along my happy way, seeing the feeds post properly to my Twitter once more.

But it turns out Archive.org is the true culprit in this case. For some reason the hosting I did from there was no longer allowing iTunes or Stitcher to pull the show off the feeds. While Alludra's pets may be properly hosted (with a lot of work and fixing!), for some reason Battle Pets would never show up. After weeks of working with it, (and seeing the shows finally show up weeks later, in one case I show I hadn't yet tried to edit to make more compliant) I decided to move battle pets to a new home. This of course is a big challenge as I am still unemployed in spite of my best efforts.

Lesson learned! Updates will now be going up normally and on time, and a lot of the month-long stress this has caused me is dealt with!

Since Alludra's pets posts more regularly from Archive.org, I have decided to leave that podcast where it is, at least until I can find employment. I have just discovered that nothing has posted from episode 66-current, so I know what I am doing this weekend.

If this has caused problems, you have my apologies. This is a learning experience for me as well.