Support » Plugin: podPress » [Plugin: podPress] Creating 301 Redirect with Podpress

  • I recently added Podtrac Enhanced feeds to my category feeds within Podpress so that my stats would be better.

    Unfortunately, I am supposed to create some 301 redirect.
    I use Godaddy hosting (yay).

    Can someone walk me through how to create that redirect from the old feed to the new one?

    Thanks!!!!
    DR

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/podpress/

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
  • Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    This is what I’m supposed to do:

    You should set your web server to return an HTTP 301 response and redirect when receiving a request for the old feed. Doing so will cause both the iTS and most (but not all) iTunes clients that have subscribed to your podcast to pick up the new feed URL.

    Any help is appreciated.

    DR

    Plugin Author ntm

    (@ntm)

    If your server software is an Apache Server then you may use the .htaccess file to implement such a redirect.
    This Wikipedia article has a section which show the to lines of code which are necessary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_redirection#Apache_mod_rewrite
    But instead of /oldpage.html you use a part of the old feed URL e.g. ?feed=oldpodcastfeedname (or /feed/oldpodcastfeedname) and instead of http://www.example.com/newpage.html the new podcast feed URL.

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    Hi Tim-

    I recently forked all of our podcast feeds over to Podtrac and added the redirects using Godaddy’s URL redirect tool:
    IF you check http://edreach.us/category/edadmin-cast/feed it should take you to the new URL. The itunes New Feed tag is in effect.

    However- since I did this today, the feed didn’t update. It updated on our site, you can see edreach.us, but none of the podcast feeds updated.

    Is there something I did wrong or forgot to check? Podtrac was loading really slowly as well. I’m getting lots of emails, ugh. Thanks for the assistance.

    To top it off, the Podpress player seems to have disappeared from the front pages of our site. Gone. That’s never happened before.

    Something I can do about that? Activate and reactivate?

    Thanks-

    DR

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    Okay let me guess. It has something to do with this? I ran feed validator…

    Your feed appears to be encoded as “utf-8”, but your server is reporting “US-ASCII”

    Am I right?

    DR

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    Update:

    So I spoke with Godaddy. Apparently Godaddy borks the redirects to make it look like the feed is in ASCII. I had to turn all of them off.

    Many of the resources that I read- told me I could rewrite my HTACCESS folder.
    Can you give me an example of what this rewrite rule might look like?
    I looked at, I think, like 3 different styles.

    Also- does the htaccess rewrite rule go inside the WordPress section of the htaccess or outside of it?

    I’m trying to rewrite: http://edreach.us/category/edadmin-cast/feed
    to go to http://feeds.podtrac.com/WTHAMtqadUU$
    as a 301 redirect.

    An example might be nice!

    Dan

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    Alright Tim-

    I thought we had this solved. However, I did the 301 redirects right within the .htaccess file.

    The redirects work great (edreach.us/category/edadmin-cast/feed) – however- the feeds are not updating. We are getting an error like this:

    Your feed appears to be encoded as “utf-8”, but your server is reporting “US-ASCII”

    We are so close to solving this- any help would be appreciated. Also- from what I read, there needs to be some charset rewrite for ASCII to UTF and I’m lost at how to do that.

    Any clues? Thanks?

    Dan

    Plugin Author ntm

    (@ntm)

    However- since I did this today, the feed didn’t update. It updated on our site, you can see edreach.us, but none of the podcast feeds updated.

    I guess that you route only the podcast feeds through Podtrac. Right?
    Podtrac seems to rearrange the XML code of the feed a little bit it is possible that they store the feed in some kind of cache memory on there server which they update only after a certain time period. For instance Feedburner works this way. It may be possible that there is a possibility to trigger an update of the cached version manually outside of the usual update cycle. But I’m not sure about all this. Please ask Podtrac whether this is the case and whether it possible to trigger an update. It would be great if you could post you knowledge here afterwards.

    Podtrac was loading really slowly as well.

    I could observe this too. But it seems to occur only occasionally (A minute later I could reload the feed without delay).

    I’m not familiar with GoDaddy and their redirect tool.
    The RewriteCond and RewriteRule should be placed at the beginning of the .htaccess files (after RewriteEngine On) and should look like this:

    # BEGIN WordPress
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteEngine On
    
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} (category\/edadmin-cast\/feed\/?)$ [NC]
    RewriteRule (.*) http://feeds.podtrac.com/WTHAMtqadUU$ [R=301,L]
    
    ...

    I’m not sure about the error message related to the character encoding.
    The feed includes as the first line <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> and if your db settings (e.g. collation and charset) are correct (e.g. are the default WP settings) then the content output should be in UTF-8 characters.
    However it seems possible to declare a charset for certain web content via the .htaccess file: http://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-htaccess-charset.en
    There is also the possibility to declare a default charset:
    http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/en/mod/core.html#adddefaultcharset
    AddCharset and AddDefaultCharset should be at the beginning of the .htaccess file.

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    I turned off the redirect, and used the link that you sent me. Below is how I wrote it.

    Seemed to load faster- but no feed update and same error. This is what that looks like. They are taking all day to get back to me (sometimes 2 days). Ugh.

    Thanks, Tim.

    rewriteengine on
    rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.edreach.us$ [OR]
    rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^edreach.us$
    rewriterule ^category\/edadmin-cast\/feed$ "http\:\/\/feeds\.podtrac\.com\/WTHAMtqadUU$" [R=301,L] #504ff64ba2984
    rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.edreach.us$ [OR]
    rewritecond %{HTTP_HOST} ^edreach.us$
    rewriterule ^newsletter$ "http\:\/\/edreach\.us1\.list-manage2\.com\/subscribe?u=52c806c527b871e20ee9e9ba7&id=bc9e8ba8e8" [R=301,L] #4f836f411065a
    
    # BEGIN WordPress
    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    RewriteBase /
    RewriteRule ^category/littech/feed http://feeds.podtrac.com/Pkb6GU-CLAU$ [L,R=301]
    RewriteRule ^category/edunationcast/feed http://feeds.podtrac.com/ntX-BC3LTIc$ [L,R=301]
    RewriteRule ^category/edadmin-cast/feed http://feeds.podtrac.com/WTHAMtqadUU$ [L,R=301]
    </IfModule>
    # END WordPress
    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    Just testing…

    I added one of our feeds that didn’t have the redirect on to feed validator, and it comes up clean:

    edreach.us/category/google-educast/feed

    DR

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    I edited the htaccess file.

    I added

    AddType 'text/html; charset=UTF-8' html

    to the htaccess file right in the beginning. I have to say the re-directs happen much faster, however, it still gives me that error, and the feeds still don’t update.

    I’m going on day three of this, and we feel like we’re close. What now?

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    One more question:

    I’m going to reach out to your creativity, Tim.

    Could there be a way to encode the URL redirects within Podpress?
    http://edreach.us/category/littech/feed
    to
    http://feeds.podtrac.com/Pkb6GU-CLAU$

    That seems to me like something that might be helpful and save folks a lot of time that want to change their feeds. Plus- going in and editing htaccess might be out of reach for many. I did it, but I’m not many.

    What do you think?

    DR

    Plugin Author ntm

    (@ntm)

    Seemed to load faster- but no feed update and same error.

    Faster is good. But if the feed is not updating then it is probably because Podtrac caches the feed on their server. Please, ask them whether if that is the case and how one can trigger a manual update.

    Your .htaccess file looks probably okay. But I would write the first block of line also inside the

    <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
    ...
    </IfModule>

    because the all the commands depend on the availability of the Apache Module mod_rewrite and this tag says basically that if the module exists then execute the commands inside the tags.
    But this is only a side note.

    I added

    AddType ‘text/html; charset=UTF-8’ html

    to the htaccess file right in the beginning.[…]it still gives me that error,

    I would say that this is not the right command. Because you define that all HTML output is in UTF-8. But the feed output is XML.
    I would use the AddDefaultCharset because it defines the charset for all content.
    But it is possible that you can not solve this by putting this into your .htaccess. That error message comes from the feed validator after the validation of the feed which comes from Podtrac. As you can read in the explanation of the error message “[…]The XML appears to be using one encoding, but the HTTP headers from the web server indicate a different charset[…]”. Adding the charset to the .htaccess file on your server will make it sure that your server output is in UTF-8. But I don’t know whether it will have an influence on HTTP header the Podtrac server. You may try using the AddDefaultCharset in your .htaccess file but if the message still appears after the feed updates then it is probably save to say that the Podtrac guys should adjust their server configuration.

    There is something else I noticed viewing your .htaccess content: the WordPress section seems no longer to contain the default rules and conditions (see http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Creating_and_editing_.28.htaccess.29). Are the links in your blog still working?

    Could there be a way to encode the URL redirects within Podpress?

    Well, it is technically possible to redirect the request of the original URLs to new locations. But have not much time to work on podPress and there are also other features I would like implement on my list. That is why I will not implement such a function any time soon.
    I know that other plugins exist which allow you to redirect the feed URLs for isntance to Feedburner. I believe that you can also do redirects to other proxy services or e.g. Podtrac with those plugins.

    Plugin Author ntm

    (@ntm)

    For instance you can use the plugin Redirection to implement redirections without editing the .htaccess file.

    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    Okay-

    So I actually talked to Podtrac on the phone today. We went back and forth. Basically they said that by adding my raw feed redirecting to Podtract is creating some sort of re-direct loop and not updating the feed.

    I tried a test. In the htaccess file I created a redirect to a feedburner feed:

    feed://feeds.feedburner.com/edunation

    No error message. However- the feed never updated after a new show went in.

    Whatever it is- whenever I try to implement a redirect- it STOPs the feed update. Podtrac said it was like being in a room with an “in” door without any “out” door. Okay…

    There is a button on podtracs side to “refresh” feeds. I hit it, then nothing.

    We recently had a dev do some work on adding custom post types for us. He edited the functions.php file. I wonder if you could see anything that might make this happen? I know that when I take away these redirects- the feeds will update once again.

    /**
     * Custom Post Types
     */
    register_post_type(
      'podcast', array(
        'label'         => 'Podcast',
        'public'        => true,
        'show_ui'       => true,
        'capability_type'   => 'post',
        'hierarchical'      => false,
        'has_archive'     => true,
        'query_var'       => true,
        'supports'        => array(
          'title',
          'editor',
          'author',
          'comments',
          'revisions',
          'thumbnail',
          //'page-attributes',
        ),
        'taxonomies'      => array('podcast-channel', 'category', 'post_tag'),
      )
    );
    
    function add_category_to_cpt() {
      register_taxonomy_for_object_type('category', 'podcast');
      register_taxonomy_for_object_type('post_tag', 'podcast');
    }
    add_action('init', 'add_category_to_cpt');
    Thread Starter drezac

    (@drezac)

    The Redirections looks interesting, but doesn’t that just write to the htaccess folder anyway?

    DR

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 17 total)
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