pcasts.in URL error 404 instead of opening feed

  • Unknown's avatar
    quinncomendant · Member ·

    I’m using the PodLove Subscribe Button library to help people subscribe to podcasts on my website. It produces the following URL:

    https://pcasts.in/feed/media.sbinstitute.com/courses/the-shamatha-trilogy/feed.xml

    However, this URL results in a 404 Not Found error, despite the origin of this feed existing.

    Others seem to be using the pcasts.in service successfully, for example this one.

    Is there a problem with my feed, or with how PodLove is generating the pcasts.in URL?

  • Unknown's avatar
    helper-mobilefox · Member ·

    Checking this out I see a something going on that could keep your podcast from working as you’d like. Your feed doesn’t have an iTunes tag for block set. This tag lets us know if your feed should be private or public. Since this isn’t set to yes or no, Pocket Casts is using the default of private. That means your show isn’t showing in search results and your show’s link in our app will look like this: https://pca.st/private/ad0162a0-cc42-013a-d963-0acc26574db2

    Do you mean for the podcast to be public? We can switch that for you if so which may improve how the pcasts.in link looks for you.

  • Unknown's avatar
    quinncomendant · Member ·

    Hello @staff-mobilefox,

    I tried adding <itunes:block>No</itunes:block> as you suggested, but it didn’t fix the 404 error when using pcasts.in with our feed URL. This feed is public, so it should be accessible.

    Do you have any documentation published on how to use the pcasts.in URL service? I’m guessing it’s not as simple as appending our feed URL as https://pcasts.in/feed/{FEED-URL}. It seems the feed has to be registered with Pocket Casts first, then is accessed via a feed identifier like, https://pcasts.in/feed/{FEED-ID}. In the case of the example I provided earlier, the identifier simply appears to be a URL.

    If this is true, then how do I register a feed with Pocket Casts so that I can use it with the pcasts.in URL service?

    BTW, regarding <itunes:block>, as far as I understand Apple’s documentation, it is acceptable and valid to exclude this tag from a feed XML. The docs do not list it as a “required” or even a “Recommended” tag. In fact, it states explicitly, “Specifying any value other than Yes has no effect.”

    Thanks for you help!

  • geekygecko · Staff ·

    Hi @quinncomendant,

    The domain for this feature is https://pca.st instead of https://pcasts.in.

    For example: https://pca.st/feed/londonisbluepodcast.libsyn.com/rss

    BTW, regarding <itunes:block>, as far as I understand Apple’s documentation, it is acceptable and valid to exclude this tag from a feed XML.

    Yes, you can leave this off. The issue for the “The Shamatha Trilogy” podcast is that we incorrectly marked it as private. I’m just looking into why that was the case, as it’s causing the following URL to fail. https://pca.st/feed/media.sbinstitute.com/courses/the-shamatha-trilogy/feed.xml

    Philip

  • geekygecko · Staff ·

    The issue with the URL not working for The Shamatha Trilogy” podcast has been fixed. Thanks for letting us know.

  • Unknown's avatar
    joerootpk80 · Member ·

    I’m also encountering this issue right now. The PodLove Subscribe Button generates a pcasts.in URL for my podcast feed, but it results in a 404 Not Found error, even though the feed itself exists.

    I’m not sure if it’s an issue with my feed setup or something on PodLove’s end. Has anyone found a solution or workaround for this?

  • staff-frank · Staff ·

    Hi @joerootpk80,

    To help us understand the problem better, could you please tell us if this is a public feed? If it is, would you mind sharing the RSS feed URL with us here? This will allow us to test it on our end and see if we can identify the source of the 404 error.

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