WP1.5 Podcasting Broken?

I installed wordpress 1.5 recently and had troubles with podcasting too. Here’s what i’ve figured out through experimentation and looking at the source. Please correct me if i have anything wrong. I’m generally very happy with wordpress but the auto-enclosure stuff still has some rough edges.

1. When you publish a post, wordpress goes through each url in the post (the url must begin with ‘http’) and goes to that server and fetches an http header for it. If the mime type begins with ‘audio’ or ‘video’, it rememberss the file size and mime type and creates an enclosure for that url.

2. If retrieval of the http header for an url fails for some reason then wordpress won’t create an enclosure. This could happen if your wordpress server is offline, the file host is offline, or if the file host is misconfigured and returns the wrong mime type (say, text/html instead of video/quicktime)

3. WordPress will also fail if the server returns a 302 and tries to redirect you to another url. I’ve looked at the code for this and wordpress sees the text/html content type of the 302 message, and continues on, ignoring the new url it’s been given. I ran in to this because i have some video hosted at archive.org and wordpress didn’t make an enclosure for this url. I fetched the http header by hand and realized it was getting redirected. I bet archive.org does that for all it’s urls and wordpress 1.5 blogs won’t include any archive.org urls in their podcasts.

Here is my wishlist:

– fix wordpress so it follows referals
– give feedback so the user can tell when enclosure creation has failed. Ignore urls that obviously aren’t audio/video like html,htm,jpg, gif, etc.
– wordpress should also recognize application/x-shockwave-flash since quicktime, real and other video apps are able to play flash and flash is so common.

To use automatic enclosures in WP1.5 links must be in this format:

<a href="http://example.com/my-podcast.mp3">My podcast</a>

The link must be absolute.

See Penny News for an example.

mine works fine…. it even gives me a duplicate of the enclosure… would you like one of mine bibb? i’m trying to get rid of it myself… 🙂

now i just have to figure out why my feed will only show 4 of my 6 podcasts…. apple has me down for only 4 shows… i know i’m still new, but every episode posted up there means something….

my podcast on http://dgold.info/radio/
is fairly new… Not sure how to tell if anyone’s getting the podcast on my RSS feeds? My server logs show many people getting my mp3’s, whether by direct download or RSS enclosure I don’t know.

I see the enclosures on them in my WP Admin > Manage Posts… And I did not create the enclosure custom field, WP1.5 did it automatically from the True link to the mp3 I included in the post. So that part is good.

I learned that it’s a no-no to have more than one enclosure? What am I supposed to do if I have a “podcast” that is 8 mp3 tracks? Must I combine them into 1?

At one time I had 2 mp3’s, in 1 post. Feedvalidator told me that was making my RSS feed invalid. Even after removing one mp3 link in the text of the post, it did not remove the extra “enclosure” field — so I had to delete that in the post (finally figured out what was causing this!)

Overall I think WordPress is working great for my podcast, but if anyone here has some tips I’d like to learn more and improve my site.

i second the file name spacing problem — even won’t work. taking out all the spaces in my mp3s immediately fixed my problems w/ the podcast being recognized correctly in iTunes.