So Podpress sounded great on paper, and as far as I could tell didn’t do one damn thing it was supposed to. I moved the torrentcast.php file up to the main blog directory, turned off the cache, I did my post and attached media to it (the most recent show.) I included the MP3 and the torrent URL, and published. The flash player never showed up, the torrent URL never showed up in the RSS feed, no iTunes tags ever showed up. It did write the enclosure metadata, but to the MP3 rather than the torrent I wanted it to use. I farted with it for a little bit and found it highly frustrating. I tried to re-edit the post to make it take my torrent information and it just refused. I’d try to delete the meta tag altogether and podPress kept helpfully adding it back automatically while I was trying to delete it, forcing me to go into mysql and do it manually. I looked through the sparse documentation to see if one had to do something more than just turn options on in the config to make all this stuff active, but I didn’t see it.
My first impressions from using this is that it’s a great idea but the execution isn’t nearly baked. I found that the experience of trying to make it work just sucked, was confusing, didn’t work but provided no indications of why not. I would at this point not recommend using podPress. If people find that it has improved later on, let me know and I’ll give it another chance. For now, I don’t plan on wasting any more of my precious time on this flakey thing.
I use podpress on my son’s podcast and so far I haven’t had any problems with it. We don’t use a torrent right now since there aren’t enough subscribers to justify it. I just downloaded the latest version today and put it on the site and noticed that the flash player doesn’t show up automatically anymore. I checked the settings and they changed the default, to not showing the player preview. I went in changed the setting and it shows up again. I do agree that the documentation is to put it politely sparse. However, I have found it to work really well for my purposes.
Sam, I had the check box for using the player checked, it never showed up. If I was only doing direct MP3, at least it would have done enough to make it reasonable by putting in the enclosure. As it was, it was just a very complicated way to use the metadata capacity that WordPress already had.
As a general blanket statement, I think podcasters underestimate how podcast-ready WordPress is – without any additional plugins.
I’ve had problems with Podpress as well. I currently have the files on a different server/domain, and even though it claims that’s ok it still gives me problems. On top of that, their website seems to be down (and I know I was using an out of date version). Ah well.
OK, I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who was having trouble with Podpress. I thought that I just didn’t devote enough of my time to trying to figure it out. Then I realized that any software that you can’t get even basic functionality right out of the box is software that really isn’t ready for prime time. I’m too busy to try to stay on the cutting edge.
Dave, I don’t know if you gave it another shot this evening, or just did something else, but my newsreader (Bloglines) just decided that the last 10 days of posts (12 posts) from you were actually new. Not updated, new. Strange.
I upgraded WordPress tonight, wondering if that was why Podpress didn’t work. That may indeed have marked all as new.