NT Pod Woes!

This follows on from my relatively optimistic post the other day on the NT Pod's birthday. You don't need to know any of this, but I thought that writing about it might be cathartic. Back in 2009, I made what turned out to be a terrible decision in choosing Google's Blogger (blogspot) to host my new podcast. I had already used Blogger for years here on the NT Blog, and Google was in the ascendant, so it seemed like a good idea. Alas, over the years, Blogger turned out to be a pretty poor option for podcasting. Feedburner actually fixed some of the issues, so you could take your Blogger feed, and burn a better feed in Feedburner, and for years, that helped. But then Google purchased Feedburner, and Feedburner has been sadly neglected.

My Blogger / Feedburner feed has hobbled along over the years, but has just about done the job, so I just stuck with it. Until Spotify came along. Most of my subscribers used to come through Apple Podcasts, but in recent years, Spotify has become a massive player in the podcast world. Several people asked me if I could get the NT Pod onto Spotify.

Well, I tried. I really tried. Spotify just hates Feedburner and Blogger, and try what you can, you just can't get Spotify to read their RSS feed properly. And I understand why -- Blogger is not really designed for podcasts, and Feedburner doesn't care any more.

Given that I am at last trying to invest some more time in the podcast (new episode!), I decided that I really should get the existing configuration sorted in planning for the future (and you can still hear some of that optimism in the post from last week). After many, many, many hours working on this, I am beginning to think that a neat solution is impossible. 

My first idea was to try to port over all the Blogger content to RSS.com, but they could not process all of the Blogger content, and it was a no-go. So I tried WordPress. They have a dedicated tool to redirect blogger content, and it seemed to work. I was very encouraged. I did a bit of a redesign in WordPress, and moved the hosting all to my own new subdomain. OK, the redesign needed work, but the tech side seemed to be working. 

Happy with where things were, I tried submitting the new WordPress feed to Spotify. They rejected it. No "author" or "email" attributes in the new feed. So I worked out how to add those, and pinged them again. Still no good: you have no "enclosures" in your feed, they said. Somehow, the port over from Blogger had not included any of the enclosures.

More research. It turned out it was virtually impossible to automate all those "enclosures" (the actual audio files). I'd have to add them manually to the RSS feed. By this point, I was getting better at manipulating RSS feeds in WordPress, using a plug-in called All-in-one SEO, and after a lot of experimentation, I worked out not only how to add the enclosures, but also how to add the "length" of each episode, something that is impossible to do in Blogger or Feedburner, and which really improves the feed. 

I manually added the relevant enclosures to every episode (going back to Ep. #83; I wanted to see if this fix would work first), and had to find the length of each ep., again manually, and added it all in (in bytes -- that's how it's done in enclosures in RSS). The RSS feed validated, and I felt like it was an Alleluia moment. I submitted the new beautiful feed to Spotify and guess what? 

More problems. Now Spotify was only showing seven episodes, eps. #83-89. I got in touch with their support team for the umpteenth time and they told me that there were problems with the "GUIDs" in the feed, the "Globally Unique Identifier". More research; more googling. Even more difficult than the previous issues. Why does no one else on the internet seem to have these issues? Perhaps because they were sensible enough not to choose Blogger for their podcast back in 2009. 

So where do we go from here? Pretty close to giving up and going back to the status quo, but the difficulties here are that it does not solve the Spotify problem, and I'm stuck with a poor option, on Blogger, for the longer term future. 

I still have a couple of things to try, and it's not impossible that I could still fix everything, but my optimism is waning. If the worst comes to the worst, I may simply have to stick with Blogger with all its issues, and simply begin a fresh podcast on Spotify, and submit it directly, beginning from ep. 110. 

In the process, I've learned a huge amount about the tech of podcasting. When I attempted to switch to the new feed on Apple podcasts, it eliminated every episode except those that were appearing on the new WordPress feed. And do I really want an RSS feed that goes on for 50 pages?

Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that I had dedicated the time to recording several new episodes. Hey-ho. 

This post is mainly for my own catharsis. Somehow writing about these things helps. I really should not have abandoned this blog for so long!