Author Topic: Podcast feed issues  (Read 8866 times)

thatbaldguy

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on: August 26, 2012, 01:59:07 PM
Is it just me, or has the Podcastle podcast feed been experiencing some issues for the past few weeks? Episodes 213-219 keep popping up as new episodes at the top of the feed, which means they're getting re-downloaded every few days.

I use DoggCatcher on Android on a Jellybean device.

-TBG



Fenrix

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Reply #1 on: August 26, 2012, 02:28:52 PM
iTunes does not seem to be grabbing episode 222

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Listener

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Reply #2 on: August 27, 2012, 12:31:34 PM
Is it just me, or has the Podcastle podcast feed been experiencing some issues for the past few weeks? Episodes 213-219 keep popping up as new episodes at the top of the feed, which means they're getting re-downloaded every few days.

I use DoggCatcher on Android on a Jellybean device.

-TBG

I replicated this issue with Android running stock CM7 and podcatching with Pocket Casts.

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Devoted135

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Reply #3 on: August 27, 2012, 01:57:53 PM
iTunes grabbed PC222 just fine for me, assuming that it dropped a bit later than usual. :)



DKT

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Reply #4 on: August 27, 2012, 03:13:44 PM
Is it just me, or has the Podcastle podcast feed been experiencing some issues for the past few weeks? Episodes 213-219 keep popping up as new episodes at the top of the feed, which means they're getting re-downloaded every few days.

I use DoggCatcher on Android on a Jellybean device.

-TBG

We had some general issues a few weeks back - maybe a month or so ago? Because of all that, some of the recent episodes probably downloaded more than once (I know they did for me). Is it still a problem for the more current episodes (220-222)?

iTunes does not seem to be grabbing episode 222

Mine grabbed it okay, but iTunes was something we were struggling with. We thought it'd been fixed, though. Have you been able to grab it yet?


Fenrix

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Reply #5 on: August 27, 2012, 03:45:35 PM
Mine grabbed it okay, but iTunes was something we were struggling with. We thought it'd been fixed, though. Have you been able to grab it yet?

It got picked up on Sunday. Thanks!

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thatbaldguy

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Reply #6 on: September 05, 2012, 12:42:14 PM
Nope, the latest episode in the feed (and on the podcastle.org homepage for that matter) is 217.



Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #7 on: September 05, 2012, 04:07:14 PM
I'm seeing everything in the web page okay, but my podcatcher (gPodder) is currently not seeing episodes 218, 220, 222, 223 and 224. (Oddly, it saw and downloaded the first three of those back when they came out, but now they've disappeared!)

(thatbaldguy: Are you connecting to the web through a proxy server of some kind? They might be caching the page)

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Wilson Fowlie

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Reply #8 on: September 05, 2012, 04:17:48 PM
... aaaaaand, there they all are now.

How... strange.

"People commonly use the word 'procrastination' to describe what they do on the Internet. It seems to me too mild to describe what's happening as merely not-doing-work. We don't call it procrastination when someone gets drunk instead of working." - Paul Graham


thatbaldguy

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Reply #9 on: September 05, 2012, 04:31:51 PM
@Wilson: Nope, no proxy. Nothing between me and the intarweebs but my ISP.

I'm seeing up to ep 224 on the site and in the feed now. Kooky.



DKT

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Reply #10 on: September 05, 2012, 05:30:03 PM
Definitely something really weird going on...I never saw the absence of episodes on the homepage, but my iTunes couldn't grab 224 until this morning, for some odd reason  ???

We'll keep looking into it.

Best,

Dave


Leishalynn

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Reply #11 on: September 18, 2012, 03:20:15 PM
I lost all of September! Opened in a new tab (IE) after visiting this thread and now !!!! The Cage and "shroom week." Thanks!  :)



UrK

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Reply #12 on: September 27, 2012, 07:23:03 PM
An news about this?
My DoggCatcher behaves erraticaly and is totally unusable.



Anduril

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Reply #13 on: October 04, 2012, 11:44:55 AM
I've been seeing problems too. In my case I'm using Downcast on an iPhone and every day or two it redownloads all of the Podcastles from 218 onward. This doesn't happen for EscapePod or any other podcasts I follow.

I looked into the issue more deeply and I think there is something going on with the RSS feed itself. I've been monitoring the RSS feed at feeds.escapeartists.net/PodCastle_Main over the last week and I'm seeing some strange behavior. It appears that that there are two versions of this RSS file. One version ends with episode 217 and has very little information beyond the title and date. The other includes all of the episodes through the most recent one and includes all of the text and other information that appears on the web site. Sometimes I see one version of the file and other times I see the other one. I believe this is likely the cause of my problems and the other issues mentioned on this thread. I suspect that when the version that ends with 217 is live Downcast thinks that's the latest podcast and then when the current RSS is live it thinks everything later than 217 is new and downloads all of them again. When the old RSS is live people also wouldn't be getting the latest episodes.

Without knowing more about your systems, I'm not sure what is the reason you are having two versions of the RSS file appear periodically, but a couple thoughts come to mind. If you have a web farm (multiple web servers) serving up the web site and/or RSS, there may be an issue with the RSS file generation on one server and not the other, so sometimes people see the current version and sometimes they get the other server and get the obsolete RSS version. Another possibility may be that you are using some custom coding or WordPress plug ins to dynamically generate the RSS from the blog posts and periodically it is failing for some reason and the version ending in 217 is the fall back file to use if it can't dynamically generate an up to date one. There are a million other possibilities, but hopefully this is helpful in tracking down this vexing issue.

Thanks for the great job all of you do every week.



scarbarough

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Reply #14 on: November 15, 2012, 11:17:43 PM
Has anything happened with this? I'm still getting PC 210-217 more often than the current set of podcasts...and when I'm checking here on the site at podcastle . org/feed, I'm regularly seeing it switch from a feed ending at 217 to a feed ending at 234. It would be killing the data usage on my phone if I hadn't disabled it...and it makes actually listening to podcastle nearly impossible. Not having any trouble with any other podcast...



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Reply #15 on: November 15, 2012, 11:29:52 PM
Really? No, I thought the issue had been resolved.

Sorry, folks. We'll continue to work on it.


scarbarough

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Reply #16 on: December 07, 2012, 12:14:15 AM
Any luck on this? When I'm reloading the site (podcastle.org/feed) right now, it keeps switching between 237 and 217 being the most recent episode...



eytanz

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Reply #17 on: December 07, 2012, 02:13:30 PM
Yeah, it's definitely still going on. I've had to set Podcastle to no longer automatically download or it will keep downloading the episodes over and over.

I think scarbarough is on to something, by the way - could it be that there's a cahced version of the feed from around episode 217 that keeps getting loaded and is somehow interfering with the correct feed? That would explain why episdoes 218 onwards keep getting marked as new.



gocyclones

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Reply #18 on: December 18, 2012, 08:18:04 PM
Also still seeing this feed in flux between old and new episodes.  Annoying when my downcast player tries do download 20 episodes at once that I've already listened to.  Hope someone on the feed side can actually figure out or even acknowledge the issue.

gocyclones



lowky

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Reply #19 on: December 19, 2012, 01:45:12 AM
No issues with itunes.


cephalopod

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Reply #20 on: January 07, 2013, 04:53:55 AM
I'm still having this problem. podcastle.org/feed randomly switches from the correct current feed to an old one consisting of ep217 and older. This isn't software specific, just loading the raw feed returns different results. I haven't figured out a pattern to why/when it switches.
It looks like a caching issue, but it seems to be server side.
I really like podcastle, but if this keeps up I'm going to have to drop the feed. This has been going on for months...



DrKwang

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Reply #21 on: January 25, 2013, 11:18:20 PM
I just gave it a test and this is definitely still happening. I've got Downcast on my iPod configured to keep all episodes of PodCastle. I turned that off today (switched to my normal "Keep Unplayed" and, within a couple of hours, I redownloaded everything from 218 on.