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Alexa Skill Feeds (or fun with certificates)

Getting an Alexa skill running without any real support has been a bit of an adventure. The interface looks straight forward enough but the error codes when trying to validate a feed turned out to be pretty frustrating.The troubles came down to json formatting and certificate validation. The error messages are practically useless, but they basically break down into errors about the data in the feed and the connection to the feed.Interestingly, different levels of escaping turn out to be acceptable. This template ended up working, but if you escape the forward slashes, it also works:

{
  "uid": "SOME_RANDOM_ID_OR_GUID",
  "updateDate": "2017-01-03T00:35:12.0Z",
  "titleText": "This is my title...",
  "mainText": "",
  "streamUrl": "https://somewhere.com/myaudiostream.mp3",
  "redirectionUrl": "http://somewhere.that/shows/on/the/card"
}

The certificate issues were a bigger problem. Certain certificates were validated by browsers but would give connection errors — but not every time. I think the problems with the Comodo certificates I tried came down to issues with the intermediate certificates.As discovered by a lot of people around the internet, LetsEncrypt certificates seem to be totally unacceptable.If you’re having connection issues you can’t track down, try validating your site here:

https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/

The slightest issue discovered is probably a blocker.Ultimately a GoDaddy certificate is what got us going.Good Luck!
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