Podpress, Feeds, and Feedburner

As many of you know, last week I added the Shards of Consciousness podcast to the site. I used Podpress to power the cast, Version 7.3 to be exact. Everything seemed just dandy. Podpress includes a neat little flash player so you can stream the cast from your blog. It enters the details needed by iTunes into the feed. Unfortunately, it was also stripping all the html out of the body of the posts in the feed so those of you using feed readers saw a beautiful blob of plain text in which the words ran into each other like ice cream left in the sun.

Yesterday I was fortunate enough to have the day off, and after a word from Renee at Small Dogs Paradise, I decided I better devote some extra time to try to track down the problem. If one person cares enough to comment, many other are seeing the same thing and either silently tolerating it or going somewhere else.

At first I thought the problem was Wordpress 2.1. I don’t look at Shards every day through a feed reader, and only knew that the problem appeared after I upgraded Wordpress. Searching through Google, though, I found that other Podpress users were experiencing the same problem after upgrading to Wordpress 2.1 and Podpress 7.3. That narrowed things down considerably. I knew the problem was probably somewhere in Podpress.

I know how to program C/C++, but I know diddly squat about PHP. Fortunately, programming is programming, so if you know one language you can quickly get an idea of the formalisms of another. I spent the day going through the files of Podpress, to little avail.

I also spent a lot of my time with my local installation of Wordpress. I began getting frustrated when its feed began working properly, and I didn’t have the least idea how I had done it. But! Now I knew the problem could be fixed.

After learning many ways to not fix the problem, it finally dawned on my that the conflict was between Feedburner and Podpress. Those of you who use Feedburner know that it takes one feed and redirects it to your Feedburner feed. Podpress does something similar. It applies its magic to one feed. Its default was not the feed I had going to Feedburner. Once I changed it, the world became right. Podpress was doing it’s job on the blog. My feed was nicely formatted. I went to bed fulfilled.

One thing I forgot to say is that I also had to disable the Feedburner Feed Replacement plugin. This plugin takes all your feeds and redirects them to one feed, that you register as the source feed for Feedburner. The multiple feed part was confusing Podpress or Wordpress somewhere along the way, so the plugin had to be disabled. That wasn’t a big thing, though, since my pages all list the Feedburner feed instead of my Wordpress feed anyway.

Thank you, Renee, for the motivation! And thank all of you for caring enough about what you find here to fight through the blobs of text to read it.

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