My First Podcast: A Tale of a Broken Ecosystem :: Jon Gjengset

My First Podcast: A Tale of a Broken Ecosystem (9 min. read)

Posted on Jul 10, 2019 — shared on Hacker News Twitter

I’ve been play­ing around with the idea for a new pod­cast along with a cou­ple of other Rus­taceans re­cently, and a lit­tle while back we de­cided to go ahead and record an episode on the newly re­lease Rust 1.36.0 (stay tuned!). Yes­ter­day, I spent some time try­ing to get all the “stuff” set up to ac­tu­ally re­lease the pod­cast, and it re­sulted in per­haps the most frus­trat­ing few tech-re­lated hours I’ve had in a few years.

I de­cided I didn’t want any­thing fancy; I’d just up­load the recorded episode to Back­blaze B2, where I al­ready have an ac­count for backup pur­poses, and then use GitHub Pages for a su­per-bare­bones web­site and an RSS feed for the pod­cast episodes. Seems sim­ple enough, right? I just needed to fig­ure out the feed stuff, and then I’d be good to go.

So, as any lazy pro­gram­mer does, I started by search­ing for “jekyll pod­cast rss”, since GitHub pages is ba­si­cally Jekyll. And lo and be­hold, “Pod­cast­ing with Jekyll in 4 Steps” pops up. Great! I’ll be done in no time. Seems easy enough. Steps 1 and 2 I’ve al­ready com­pleted. Copy-paste the RSS tem­plate, and it seems to gen­er­ate cor­rectly, great!

Now just to dou­ble check, let’s run it through a val­ida­tor. “itunes pod­cast rss val­ida­tor” brings up Cast Feed Val­ida­tor, pod­base, and FEED val­ida­tor. I guess let’s try all three. They all com­plain about slightly dif­fer­ent things, like the <atom::link> tag not point­ing to the right URL, so I do some tweak­ing to make things work on GitHub Pages. Oh, yeah, and ap­par­ently iTunes only ac­cepts cer­tain HTTPS cer­tifi­cates, and the one used by GitHub Pages isn’t one of them. I guess I’ll have to proxy through Cloud­Flare or some­thing.

This process does cause me to read through the XML more care­fully though, and I see a num­ber of other things that seem odd. First, there are sev­eral calls to xml_escape, which seems weird given the ex­is­tence of CDATA. Sec­ond, <description>, <itunes:subtitle>, and <itunes:summary> seem very over­lap­ping – how do they dif­fer? It’s time to look for the spec!

iTunes seems to be the pri­mary stan­dard-set­ter for pod­cast RSS feeds, so I quickly end up at Apple’s Pod­cast feed sam­ple. Ex­cept this also has a num­ber of tags my feed does not, such as <itunes:type> and <itunes:title> (how does it dif­fer from <title>?). I also see that they are nest­ing some­thing called <content:encoded> in­side of <description>, and also using CDATA. Their value in <itunes:duration> is in sec­onds, not as HH:MM:SS. I try to match my XML to theirs — it now fails val­i­da­tion. Okay… Is there a full spec­i­fi­ca­tion some­where?

I find Apple’s Pod­cast best prac­tices, which goes into some more de­tails about the dif­fer­ence be­tween dif­fer­ent tags (like sum­mary and de­scrip­tion). They say that <content::encoded> should be sep­a­rate from <description>, in di­rect con­tra­dic­tion of the feed ex­am­ple. They also rec­om­mend <itunes:type>, ex­cept that tag is re­jected by the val­ida­tor as not part of the schema.

I find Apple’s Pod­caster’s guide to RSS. This has an of­fi­cial-look­ing table with “re­quired tags” and “rec­om­mended tags”. Fi­nally! Ex­cept here, for <description>, the ex­am­ple shows <content:encoded>? The “best prac­tices” doc­u­ment also said that <content:encoded> could be used at “episode-level only”, whereas this doc­u­ment seems to say that all de­scrip­tion el­e­ments should have it? At the bot­tom, it says “only use markup or HTML con­tained within <content:encoded> tags in­side of <description> tags”, re­it­er­at­ing that one should be in­side the other, even though this seems con­trary to the RSS spec (see also Stack­Over­flow). The spec also says that if <content:encoded> is pre­sent, <description> should be used as a sum­mary (so what is <itunes:summary> for?).

This doc­u­ment also spec­i­fies that <itunes:title> should be used for episode ti­tles, not <title>, whereas the same is not true for the chan­nel title. At least it clar­i­fies that <itunes:duration> can take “dif­fer­ent du­ra­tion for­mats”, so that (maybe) ex­plains it being given in both sec­onds and HH:MM:SS for­mat. Oh, and <itunes:keywords> is also ap­par­ently not a thing. And when it says that you can use false or true for things like <itunes:explicit>, that’s a lie – you must use no or yes.

Okay, so that is a hot mess. Let’s see what schema Google rec­om­mends for its pod­cast feeds. Some ini­tial Googling leads us to this page, which has a link to the XSD schema file and a Google Sup­port an­swer. The lat­ter does give an out­line of the re­quired tags, but it seems to mostly be “do what iTunes re­quires and we’ll fig­ure it out”. They pro­vide their own googleplay name­space if you need to, say, use a dif­fer­ent e-mail ad­dress on Google. Un­for­tu­nately, their “Sam­ple pod­cast RSS feed” doesn’t val­i­date, be­cause:

Use of un­known name­space: http://​www.​google.​com/​schemas/​play-​podcasts/​1.​0

Great, so the googleplay name­space doesn’t work, so you can’t use a dif­fer­ent e-mail ad­dress for iTunes and Google Play. Fan­tas­tic.

Okay, what­ever, let’s at least just see whether iTunes will ac­cept what I now have. I’m just going to sign up for an Apple ID real quick. Just have to fill out this lit­tle form (which re­quires JavaScript, be­cause of course it does) and then ver­ify my e-mail. Easy enough.

Your ac­count can­not be cre­ated at this time.

Err, what? Okay, dif­fer­ent e-mail ad­dress?

Your ac­count can­not be cre­ated at this time.

Err, okay, dif­fer­ent browser?

Your ac­count can­not be cre­ated at this time.

Dif­fer­ent browser, e-mail ad­dress, and over VPN?

Your ac­count can­not be cre­ated at this time.

I guess it’s time to con­tact Apple sup­port. My only op­tion is to ei­ther have them call me or sched­ule a call for later. No idea why on­line sup­port isn’t a thing, but okay. I put in my phone num­ber and the cryp­tic error mes­sage and wait. Two min­utes later, I get a text from Google Fi that I have a missed call. Ap­par­ently Apple Sup­port tried to call me and it went to voice­mail. Huh, weird. I was by my phone the whole time and it never rang. I get an e-mail say­ing they failed to reach me and will try again. I get an­other missed call from voice­mail. Apple gives up.

After dig­ging through my calls list, I no­tice that the missed calls show the in­com­ing calls from Apple with the “Blocked spam caller” icon. Uh-oh. I guess Google Fi marks Apple Sup­port as spam? Great. I un­mark as spam and file an­other sup­port ticket. The call goes through im­me­di­ately.

Okay, so I’m speak­ing to Porschia. Seems friendly enough. I tell them my issue again and my e-mail ad­dress. They dis­ap­pear for a while, oc­ca­sion­ally check­ing back that it’ll just be a bit longer. After about 10 min­utes of mostly si­lence, they tell me to try again. It works! I ask why. “Your e-mail had to be whitelisted”. What?! Ap­par­ently Apple doesn’t like peo­ple with e-mail ad­dresses under cus­tom do­mains sign­ing up for an Apple ID? How bizarre.

Well, I have an Apple ID ac­count now, so on­wards! The In­ter­webs tell me that I should now go to Pod­casts Con­nect, so I do.

Pod­casts Con­nect re­quires an iTunes Store ac­count.

Err… And that’s dif­fer­ent from an Apple ID? Ap­par­ently a magic “bless­ing” hap­pens to your Apple ac­count the first time you log in through an Apple prod­uct (ei­ther a de­vice or iTunes). And that bless­ing is needed to pub­lish a pod­cast. I guess that’s next. But… I’m on Linux, and I own no Apple de­vices. There is quite lit­er­ally no way for me to log into an Apple prod­uct. Un­less…

A while back, Mi­crosoft re­leased Win­dows vir­tual ma­chine im­ages to allow you to test stuff in older ver­sions of In­ter­net Ex­plorer. They’re free to down­load, but ex­pire after 90 days. That’s fine. I just need to log in to iTunes. So, I down­load a Win­dows VM, in­stall iTunes on there, log in with my new Apple ID, give my ad­dress, and click con­tinue ex­pect­ing that there’s some ad­di­tional process I have to go through in­volv­ing a credit card and what­not to get my ac­count blessed.

You have been logged in to iTunes.

So, let me get this straight. I had to down­load a 6GB Win­dows VM + 200MB of iTunes just so I could fill in my ad­dress? There re­ally wasn’t any way I could have done this through the web Apple? At least I’m not the only one who has com­mented on this being stu­pid in the past.

Any­way, with my spe­cial iTunes Store ac­count in hand, I now nav­i­gate back to Pod­casts Con­nect, and am met with a mostly blank page with a sin­gle text input field named “RSS Feed URL”. I give it what it wants, and it spins for a while. Then

Failed Val­i­da­tion

No fur­ther ex­pla­na­tion. It just.. Failed. Back to the other val­ida­tors I guess. The un­rec­og­nized Google Play schema de­f­i­n­i­tion was the only re­ported error, so I re­moved that. An what do you know, that was it. iTunes val­i­dated my XML! Now let’s just dou­ble-check the de­tails it has ex­tracted. Huh, that’s weird. The episode list­ing shows a blank string under “De­scrip­tion” for the in­cluded episode. After some dig­ging, it turns out that the pod­cast episode “De­scrip­tion” in this list is, wait for it… <itunes:subtitle>. Be­cause it’d be silly if it was any of the three other tags that are meant to be de­scrip­tions.

But hey, at least now I think I’m about ready to pub­lish this thing. Cue record scratch…