Tag: Site Issues

Feed Issues

This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series iTunes Podcast Issue

My iTunes store podcast listing is borked, the rss feed is working properly though, so use that for the time being.

I noticed the problem after uploading Follow Your Heart, and spent the next 12 hours trying to figure it out. I got it working again, kinda, I think.

There were multiple possible issues, but I couldn’t find any definite answers. Through trial and error I have decerned a few things that wreck havoc on podcast catchers and services.

  • the length of audio seems to be a factor, tracks under 40 seconds will cause some services to hang and stop processing the feed
  • feed aggregators are very finicky about formats and containers, many don’t know how to handle lossless ALAC encoded m4a, while processing lossy AAC encoded m4a just fine.
  • some services freak out over unicode characters in a podcast title, description, or post. I had a “₀” (SUBSCRIPT ZERO Unicode: U+2080) that caused issues.

Various podcast services and catcher are working again, and while the iTunes app on OS X, and Apple’s Podcast app on iOS are working, my iTunes store listing isn’t updating. Guess it’s a wait and see game at this point.

Technical Issues

I’m not receiving email from any of this domains addresses. If you need to reach me use any of my social media accounts.

I’m trying to resolve this as quick as I can with Bluehost tech support.

In the meantime I have deactivated Cloudflare (to prove its innocence in all this). The move may have introduced bugs, and the site might lag more than normal.

Sorry!
We’re working on it 😀

PS: the issue is mail is being sent directly to dev/null
If anyone can help me with that.

It happens to coincide with the latest update to dovecot

False Negative stifling inovation, punishing curiosity

Google’s Mobile Usability test thinks Boo! isn’t mobile friendly for two reasons:

  1. Touch elements too close
  2. Content not sized to viewport

It’s algorithms are flawed. I’ve tested it on numerous mobile platforms, it’s acting as intended. Granted, it’s an experimental piece. I set it up this way because fun, and as an intellectual exercise. I want it to look as if holes were cut through the post background and to print the text of a transparent text image instead of the image. I overlapped the image on top of the text accounting for issue 1. Issue 2 is probably because the image is scaled larger than the view port, but it should rescale with a js function.

I wish/hope there’s a flag I could set to tell Google that this is expected behavior and don’t knock search visibility for it—hell, in fact you should be ranking the page higher.

Foolishness (sigh)

Hunted all night to figure out why the text on my site was so small. I dissected the parent theme, every plugin, anything that adds any css. Checked and double checked every style in use. Rewrote font-size rules. And then I discovered it only affected the front page—category and tag pages worked properly. The second page on through worked properly.

There was my clue, must be a malformed post somewhere on the front page some where, must be the first one. That damn thing was written in haste and love and has all kinds of markup. I dig through that a line at a time and discover an unclosed <small> tag.

Of course of course.

The lesson here is 1) get adequate rest, I’ve been kinda over doing it lately 2) look at the obvious things first 3) check out other contexts—had I compared other pages to the front it would’ve been obvious.

Mistakes made, lessons learned, good night.

Tumblr Blues

My tumblr share button is currently sharing a youtube video. I having a feeling it’s a conflict with tumblr widget.

Deactivated the tumblr widget. Sharing button working again.