Podcast feed issues (not just iTunes)

Dear Doubtcasters,

I've noticed that for a long time the Publish dates on the Doubtcast feeds are messed up. For example, today is the 15th Dec and the latest episode is the Carl Sagan day special, however it has a publish date of the 23rd Dec 2010 implying that somehow doubtcast has invented a time-travel device to obtain audio from the future. I've tested the feed with iTunes - apart from the implausible dates it all seems to work. Unfortunately the same can not be said for a number of mobile-phone podcast clients which assume that anything with a pubDate in the future is new (regardless of whether you have already heard it).

DoggCatcher on Android will continuously re-download episodes with a future timestamp. That just wastes bandwidth and costs people money. People might get annoyed because they keep hearing the same episodes over and over again. A lot of people will simply unsubscribe (even if they enjoy the show).

If you want to see the bug simply open up iTunes. Search for Reasonable Doubts and then look at the column of dates which appears on the list of episodes. You will see that the top 7 episodes are all future-dated. The odd thing is that if you click-through to the doubtreligion.blogspot.com site we see that all the dates are correct. Somewhere between blogspot and feedburner all these dates are getting messed up and that's causing a load of nuisance to (mobile) podcast listeners around the world.

Let me know if I can be of assistance sorting this out - I think it's worth fixing this bug since problems like this can only harm the reach of the feed.

Sal

Or, you could just look at the feedburner page itself:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/reasonabledoubts/Msxh

The feedburner page is also the only podcast page that my primary podcast player ("podcaster" for the iPod touch/iPhone) can't understand. I have no clue what the problem is, but I know it isn't just the sonny dates since rd70.

If you haven't already I would suggest an email. They don't really post a whole lot on their own forums (unfortunately). IIRC, the email should be doubtcast(at)gmail(dot)com