Podtrac Redirect

In PowerPress settings, go to the services and stats tab. In there where it says “Redirect URL 1”, if it’s blank, put your podtrac redirect URL in there. If it’s got a blubrry redirect in it, click “add another redirect” and in the redirect URL 2 box, put your podtrac redirect.

-Mike (From Blubrry)

Hey, Mike,

Thanks for the info. I don’t have PowerPress though. I actually have a plugin called Sermon Manager for churches. I was just referencing Blubrry because our app developer said he’s used your plugin before and had no issues submitting podcasts with it.

Something with the Sermon Manager plugin is messing up the RSS feed for iTunes and it will not accept our podcast from the website.

Hi!

Can you please try going to Sermon Manager settings, Podcast tab, and checking “PodTrac Tracking” option.

(please download and install development version first, since there’s a small bug with saving checkbox options. No data will be lost)

I tried this, but it will not let me install your development version:

Installing Plugin from uploaded file: sermon-manager-for-wordpress.zip
Unpacking the package…

Installing the plugin…

Destination folder already exists. /nas/content/live/revivechurch/wp-content/plugins/sermon-manager-for-wordpress/

Plugin installation failed.

—

We also have a problem when submitting to iTunes. We get an error message saying that the episodes cannot be downloaded using the feed url that’s given to us through the plugin.

A friend of mine who is way more savvy at this stuff, used a feed validator and this is what he responded to me with:

Hi Stephan,

I tried validating the feed from a few different sites and you are right that something seems to be wrong. While I did not do extensive testing, the validator that I found which seemed to give some data about this issue was this one: https://podba.se/validate/

The 2 things that show up as issues are:

Byte-Range Support – My guess is that the issue here is the Podtrac analytics that are being used seeing as I had issues with it in the app as well. Something is up with how the links redirect and it makes them look like they are blank. Like I mentioned on the phone, I have worked with other analytics tools in WordPress (like Blubrry Powerpress) and it modifies the URL just like Podtrac, but it doesn’t mess up iTunes or app integration. It seems that Podtrac is just formatting something wrong.

Feed <channel> missing <author> tag – I have no idea why this is showing up as an issue. There is an <itunes:author> tag in the <channel> tag and that should be what you need. I validated a different church’s feed just now to be sure that I am correct about that, and the other feed validated fine and it had the same <author> tag style that you have. There is a chance that some funky character is there which I can’t see when viewing it (some characters don’t create whitespace, but when iTunes or a validator check them, the funky character is there and makes everything act wonky). That would be something that I couldn’t see.

—

Any help would be great! Thanks so much1

Hi, thank you for a quick response.

To install development version, you must first delete regular version (first disable the plugin and then delete) – and do not worry, no data will be lost.

We also tried to open PodTrac URLs manually in the browser and we’ve got a message that domain isn’t whitelisted, please check here.

We will also check how is Blubrry doing PodTrac integration, so we will work on improving it in Sermon Manager.

Let us know how you go

Thanks for the help!

I did install the plugin again as instructed, and the Podtrac option now stays checked. Waiting to hear back from our app developer on whether or not he still has the redirect issue.

Also checked my Podtrac account to make sure it was updated. That should be fixed now.

I also went back to iTunes and tried submitting the Podcast feed url again, but I’m getting the same error message that they can’t download episodes. Any suggestions?

Thanks for your help on this!

Hey,

I’ve been investigating a bit more, and seems like the problem is most likely not on Sermon Manager’s end.
When you tick the checkbox “PodTrac Tracking”, Sermon Manager adds redirect to PodTrac the same way as it’s described in PodTrac documentation.

So for example, when you put mp3 with URL https://www.example.com/hello.mp3, Sermon Manager will append https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/ to the beginning of the URL, so final form would look like: https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/https://www.example.com/hello.mp3 – which should work if PodTrac account is set-up correctly.

That’s everything that Sermon Manager does regarding PodTrac integration, and I don’t see that there is an issue in that process. But if we are doing something wrong, we would gladly fix it as soon as someone let us know about it.

So please, could you contact PodTrac and let us know if there is any problem on our end: https://analytics.podtrac.com/contact-us/publisher-support

They will also have access to your account so they will be able to see the whole picture.

(By the way, we have checked how Blubrry Powerpress does it, and they do it in same way, except that they use different PodTrac URL for redirects. But we will stick to the one we already use because of the information in PodTrac official documentation.)

Ok, I will investigate this. Thanks for the information!

Are you able to give me any ideas as to why the RSS feed that Sermon Manager is supplying me will not work with iTunes podcast?

Quite probably because current mp3 URLs don’t work.
If you uncheck “PodTrac tracking” option, it should work.

If it doesn’t, just let us know – we will help.

Ok, so I unchecked PodTrac tracking option, resubmitted the feed, and now it’s telling me:

Can’t submit your feed. There is no description tag in your feed, or the description tag is empty.

I have every option filled in on the form that Sermon Manager offers. The description is filled out. I tried checking and unchecking the HTML box as well to see if that would have any effect. It did not.

I took the feed url back to Podbase as Apple instructs and here are the results:

Cover art
The cover art must be 1,400–3,000 pixels square to look good on fancy retina-class displays.

Me: The cover art is not showing up at all.

Support for HTTP HEAD requests
The server for your episodes must support “HTTP HEAD requests”, which is a fancy way of saying that iTunes must be able to get information about your files without downloading them whole.

Unexpected HTTP code: 301

Byte-range support
The server for your episodes must support “byte-range requests”, which enables podcast apps to fetch media in chunks. This is required to support streaming, and is required to be promoted in iTunes.

Hrmmm, the “403” status code was unexpected.

Is there a valid iTunes category?
Podcasts must have a valid <itunes:category> tag to be accepted for iTunes.

Me: This doesn’t show up at all.

Is there an iTunes summary?
Podcasts should have a valid <itunes:summary> tag, or at least a <description>.
Good, the description looks fine.

Does it have everything it needs to be searched properly?
Podcasts must have valid <title>, <author> and <description> tags at the <channel> and <item>level of your podcast feed, so that iTunes has enough source material for its search engine.

The feed’s <channel> is missing an <author>. To be featured by iTunes, podcasts must have a valid author information.

Please let me know how I can get this fixed. I appreciate your help!

Hi,

Just checking in – is there still an issue?

We’ve run the feed through validation just minutes ago and it passes all the checks now.

Hi,

Yes it’s working. We wanted to let it run for a week to be sure before we responded.

Podtrac whitelisted the feed as well, so we can start tracking our podcast downloads soon, and iTunes approved the feed as well.

The one thing we’ve noticed is that our app developer cannot read the notes link that we include with each sermon. We even tried just adding an anchor link to the body of the description for each sermon, but the app won’t pick it up. Have you ever had anything similar happen with other churches, or do you know how we might fix that?

Hey, thanks for the reply!

Glad to hear that it’s working perfectly.

Regarding notes, I am not sure that I understand.
Notes are stored as a plain URL in the database, without any modifications, and should display without any issue.

Could you please provide further explanation and some URL or screenshot examples?

Thank you

Nikola,

Here’s the response we got from our app developer. I hope this explanation helps!

Hi Stephan,

Back with the Waiting Room series, you were posting the notes link within “Click Here” anchor text inside the description. See this sermon for an example: https://revivechurch.com/sermons/the-wait-before-the-wait/

Since the Notes link listed in the Download Files section is not being passed through the rss feed for the sermons, our hope was that the link would come through the description when posted with anchor text (so that it would look nice when reading on the website, but would also get passed through to the app).

It turns out that the link is not passed through and just the text is passed through in the description. If the description could carry the link through (for instance, as something like Click Here, which was the anticipated behavior) then the app should just start showing notes since it is programmed to utilize links within anchored text like that.

If there’s any additional information I can get please let me know. Thank you again for all your help, Nikola!

Nikola,

We are back to the same issue as the first time. Our podcast feed is no longer valid.

feedvalidator.org is saying

This feed is valid, but interoperability with the widest range of feed readers could be improved by implementing the following recommendations.

line 20, column 0: Use of unknown namespace: com-wordpress:feed-additions:1 (11 occurrences) [help]

<site xmlns=”com-wordpress:feed-additions:1″>139846772</site> <item>
line 40, column 1: item contains more than one enclosure (10 occurrences) [help]

<enclosure url=”https://revivechurch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/facebook …

And podia.se is saying

Support for HTTP HEAD requests
The server for your episodes must support “HTTP HEAD requests”, which is a fancy way of saying that iTunes must be able to get information about your files without downloading them whole.
Unexpected HTTP code: 301

Does it have everything it needs to be searched properly?
Podcasts must have valid <title>, <author> and <description> tags at the <channel> and <item>level of your podcast feed, so that iTunes has enough source material for its search engine.
The feed’s <channel> is missing an <author>. To be featured by iTunes, podcasts must have a valid author information.

Is it XML?
XML is a language that computers (and soon, robots!) use to talk to each other. This tests to see if the content at the URL is XML. Technically, it tests whether or not the content is “well formed” according to the XML standard.

Our podcast has been down since updating to the new version of Sermon Manager. Any help would be great! Thanks so much for all your hard work on this!