Another wrinkle in the adventure to get the RSS feed working: As I’ve said before, the only way to get the podcast RSS to do its job is to place a link to the show somewhere in the post. I normally generate the boilerplate stuff (like the media player you see below) using shortcode and it creates the links for me. But the RSS generator doesn’t see these auto-generated links, so it doesn’t know this is a podcast. To get around this, I must manually put a fully qualified link using raw HTML in the post body. That’s annoying and will cause chaos if the URL of this site ever changes, but fine.<\/p>\n
But I also don’t want 2 identical links to the same audio file. (The auto-generated one, and the manual one I’m forced to add.) That would be confusing for the end user. To get around this, I make the manual link invisible by making it a single empty space. This means it isn’t visible to the user, which is fine since it only exists for the benefit of the dumbass RSS generator.<\/p>\n
BUT!<\/p>\n
The newer versions of WordPress have made the editor “smarter”. Now it sees an empty invisible link, concludes that’s a mistake, and then silently deletes it from the post<\/strong>. I feel like I’m actively fighting the system all the time like this, where I have to come up with workarounds to protect my other workarounds because the system is trying to do my thinking for me.<\/p>\n Sigh. I don’t know. Maybe the RSS feed will work this week. Maybe it won’t. I did what I could.<\/p>\n