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tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
I’ve posted a podcasting plugin on my site. It’s pretty basic, but I plan to grow it as people make suggestions. It has these features:
- “Enclosures” (1 per article) in RSS and Atom feeds
- Tags to generate links (in the article) to that enclosure
- Support for any media type, including audio, video, and images, with correct MIME-type handling
- Support for relative URLs
- Support for files uploaded via Textpattern’s “Files” interface
Download v1.2 now. You might want to check the end of this thread to see if a new version has been posted.
Last edited by truist (2012-01-05 15:26:08)
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
this might come in handy! thanks in advance :)
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
I’ve just implemented this, and pushed everything through Feedburner, for The Glass Bees. Seems to work great! Thanks so much, Nathan!
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
I’m glad to hear that it’s working – thanks! Please let me know if you run into issues or need new features.
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
One thing that would be nice is if the article image could be attached to the feed (this isn’t just an issue for podcasting … it’s a longstanding oddity of textpattern which I know folks have struggled with.) I’m still not aware of a clean solution or plugin for this. But if you can add that functionality, Nathan, tru_podcast will really be complete for my needs!
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
A comment on my usage instructions page made me remember that there’s a problem with the way textpattern handles mime-types for uploaded files (through the “Files” interface). Please read the note on my Features page before using the plugin with such files. I’ll be fixing this (I have a few ideas for how) in v1.0.
Last edited by truist (2008-07-03 11:59:06)
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
floodfish – wow, I didn’t know that was a problem in textpattern. Seems kinda dumb.
I don’t think tru_podcast is the right place to fix, that… but tru_tags may already have a feature that lets you work around it. Check out Step 7 in the Configuration section of the instructions. You can probably add the image through that form, automatically. I think, though, that this gives me the excuse I’ve been looking for to break that feature out into its own plugin. (tru_feeds, probably.) I’ll work on it sometime soon ;)
I found an old reference to a patch that was supposed to make images-in-the-feed possible, at http://textsnippets.com/tags/photoblogging. That page seems to be gone – do you happen to have the code? I’d like to see what it was doing.
Last edited by truist (2008-07-03 11:58:48)
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
There’s some (not entirely conclusive) discussion of the images-in-feed issue here .
I’ll take a look at tru_tags. And I’ll be looking forward to tru_feeds! I think a lot of folks will be glad to have that one.
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
I had found that topic; it’s where I found the broken link. I added a reply mentioning tru_tags.
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
I’ve released tru_podcast v1.0 over on my site. It has a few small features, focused on making tru_podcast work with files uploaded via Textpattern’s “Files” interface. Try it out and let me know how it works for you :)
Last edited by truist (2008-07-03 11:54:46)
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
You mean tru_podcast, of course. Looking forward to seeing how you did it!
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
I’ve tested a bit and will probably stick with external URLs for now. Reasons:
- iTunes doesn’t see episodes where media was uploaded within Txp and referred to by number (just like it ignores articles without media)
- Safari’s feed view, which tries to show a representative icon for media files, comes up with its “missing image” image
- Some browsers and fetchers will store downloaded media with the Txp file number as filename and no extension (if this happens to my parents, woe is me!)
Textpattern sure is weird about file downloads.
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
Gaaa! I hate that stupid file upload system.
In order with the issues you raised:
- This is very strange – are you sure? iTunes will find the episode if you post the file manually, but not if you use TXP’s interface? The only difference (feed-wise) is that TXP is serving up the file (with it’s funny redirection and broken mime-type) – I wonder if iTunes is trying to grab the file directly and being annoyed by TXP’s broken implementation.
- Also strange about Safari. Maybe the same problem?
- This specific problem could be worked around by changing the URL slightly. TXP will work correctly (ha!) with either of these URLs: /file_download/1 or /file_download/test.mp3. I could auto-rewrite the URL to have the filename in it, given the number in the custom field.
The only solution I see to all three of these problems is to include the “direct” links in the RSS feed (e.g. /files/test.mp3). I’ll bet that solves all three problems, but it would break download counting on the “Files” tab (in the admin interface).
I suppose I should really implement both options. Do you have thoughts about the custom URL solution? Would you use it? (I suppose you don’t have download counting now…)
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
- Pretty sure, yes. For my “production” podcast feed, which has made iTunes happy from day 0, I:
- scp an MP3 to a dumb virtual host (outside Txp)
- web-browse to that directory (letting Apache generate the directory listing)
- right-click the MP3 link and copy the URL
- go into Txp and paste the URL into the “tru_podcast” field.
- Also Safari likes the feed that results from the above workflow, and finds the right icons for media enclosures.
- This would certainly help the “naive download tool + naive user” case. If it also fixes the iTunes case, I think I can switch. (Safari’s behavior isn’t critical for me, just interesting.) You’re right, I don’t have download counting now (I could analyze Dumb Virtual Host’s server logs, I guess). So if download counting works with this trick, bonus.
Maybe for this stage of development we can test these ideas with a secret “tru_podcast_fileurl_test” variable that, if passed in the query string, produces one or the other kind of URLs. Also, we should probably test some podcast clients besides iTunes.
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Re: tru_podcast: A podcasting plugin for Textpattern
schmonz wrote:
You mean tru_podcast, of course. Looking forward to seeing how you did it!
Have I read correctly? If the custom field contains a number, it’s interpreted as a reference to the uploaded file with that number. Not shifty at all. Then you internally cook up a direct link to the real home of the file and pass that to the existing header-fetch function so Textpattern isn’t involved in the header-reading, just the web server, which won’t lie about MIME types like Textpattern does. Yes shifty! But that’s an implementation secret; the podcast still gets the Textpattern-generated file URL (or the external URL, as before).
A niggle: instead of the literal “files”, tru_podcast_rss_handler() should probably honor the “File directory path” preference, yes?
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