The RSS Blog has used an RSS feed hosted on Google FeedBurner for many years, though recently we moved to a new feed on this domain, giving us more control and a chance to retain subscribers when FeedBurner someday shuts down.
FeedBurner is putting things in the feed that aren't in the source feed we provide to the service, like these channel-level elements from the itunes namespace:
<itunes:keywords>bad,podcast</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:summary>If I ever do a podcast, I guess this'll be the description.</itunes:summary>
<itunes:subtitle>If I ever do a podcast, I guess this'll be the description.</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:category text="Technology">
<itunes:category text="Podcasting"/>
</itunes:category>
It also adds enclosure elements to items that don't contain media enclosures -- along with more itunes elements. Unfortunately, the elements FeedBurner puts in cause the feed to fail validation in the RSS Validator.
After some digging I found that this weirdness is happening because at some point the FeedBurner settings for the feed turned on SmartCast, an enhancement that enables feeds to support podcasts when an item in contains one. Here's some documentation explaining the process:
When composing a new posting with your publishing tool, simply insert a link to your podcast content directly into the text. FeedBurner will take the first anchor (<a>) tag that it finds in your posting content and convert the linked URL into an RSS 2.0 <enclosure> element if FeedBurner detects the item is in a popular audio, video, or streaming media format. This conversion turns this feed item into content that current podcasting clients will download for use (see a list of clients at the bottom of this post).
This functionality was a boon for bloggers on platforms that didn't support podcasting yet.
Our RSS feed doesn't contain any podcasts. We can't turn off SmartCast without our old FeedBurner account, but this post should help some publishers whose feeds also have become haunted by phantom podcasting tags.
Categories: RSS, FeedBurner, RSS Feeds, SmartCast
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