Podcasting with Podpress
Ever since the Podcast phenomenon began to take hold of public consciousness, I had encouraged a cohort of mine to start one. He did and I had been dealing with how to easily manage his publications ever since. Managing XML manually to maintain the feed seems so archaic nowadays so I had been in search of a better way that would also allow him more control. Through the minimal amount of Google-Fu I discovered the Podpress plugin for Wordpress. Recently I completed the transition of his static site to a Wordpress with the Podpress plug-in installed where now all he has to do is FTP the MP3 up there and make a post.
The problem was that the podcast feed was already determined in iTunes, and as far as I know, there is no way to change what iTunes is looking for. This was solved by a little .htaccess mojo that was hinted at by this Apple podcast specification document. There are two options it seems. If you have and old feed and want to point it to somewhere new, you can use specific tags in the old podcast feed, or you can use the .htaccess mojo to redirect from the previous file to the one you’re looking for.
iTunes Tag:
This needs to be added to your old podcast feed.
<itunes:new-feed-url>http://newlocation.com/example.rss</itunes:new-feed-url>
.htaccess Redirect
An .htaccess file is placed it the root level of your site. Learn More.
Redirect / http://oldlocation.com/example.rss http://newlocation.com/example.rss
I opted for the latter since it’s what seemed to work.
Podpress made it much easier with their option of ‘Category Casting’. If you assign all podcasts to their own ‘category’ in Wordpress, then it will kick out a feed that is readable by iTunes. In the options for Podpress, make sure you select to set the number of items to show in this feed.
If you have to do any testing with this, PodcastAlley seems to have an almost immediate feed tracker to check your feed by, while iTunes seems to do it only once every 24 hours or so. Also, the ever great Nobody Likes Onions is my favorite site for checking if feeds are valid.
As a final note, I totally dorked up when I went live and forgot to adjust the ‘block iTunes” feed option in the plugin options. Don’t forget about that.
