anthonymellorfca

ps: I know that my English is not good. I’m sorry. Please ask, if something is unclear and I will try to find different words.

Your English is very good Tim; what is your mother tongue? I have been trying to guess from your choice of words and syntax, but cannot see it.

Anthony

Please explain “nice name” – what is the meaning of “nice” in this context? (Perhaps the “URL-friendly version” of the category name?)

Yes before I discovered PodPress I was using the feature to podcast a “category” (I think) and also you have reminded me about this in that now I see I have forgotten to add the “podcast” category to all my later podcast posts; which I assume is why nothing was updating.

WordPress produces a Feed for each category and if you put all your posts with podcast episodes manually into this category then this feed will contain all your podcasts and no other posts. This feed will probably have the same content as the Feed with the Feed Name “Podcast Feed” and the URL https://mellor.co/feed/podcast. But this feed will contain all posts which have at least one media file attached with podPress regardless of the categories of the posts. For instance if you add an episode with podPress to a post which is not in your Podcast category then this post is going to appear in the https://mellor.co/feed/podcast Feed but not in https://mellor.co/category/anthonyanswers/feed/.

Forgive me: I want to “feed a category”, my “podcast” category, to iTunes etc, so which feed will do that and only that? I think you have answered above, but I cannot see it.

I will play with Gimp, thanks.

But it seems that iTunes can handle the current image. As you can see here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/anthony-mellor-fca-chartered/id425345062 The image on this page is no cover art. It is the itunes:image which you have set at the page where you can modify and set the details of the category with the nice name Podcast.

My iTunes client was not showing my “cover art” image of myself until I added it to the mp3 files locally. Of course now I am no longer sure if I filled in the URL in PodPress settings later or earlier. I completed some but maybe not all instances of the image link (example of me not knowing what to expect).

The image which you add e.g. with iTunes to a media file will be the one which is going to be displayed e.g. in the Cover Flow view of iTunes

Does this mean the “cover flow” and the Podcast “cover” can be different?

You can change all the other ID3 data like the description with iTunes too. Some podcasters add the description of an episode as Lyrics to the files.

Is this done using the (my) localiTunes client working directly on the mp3 file? And then the mp3 file must be uploaded with all its tags prepared? If this includes an image, where does that appear?

You can change all the other ID3 data like the description with iTunes too. Some podcasters add the description of an episode as Lyrics to the files.

I wondered if that would be useful, thank you for the tip.

If I understand you, I think you are saying that there are two streams of information: one is the ID3 tag data entered via iTunes and saved with and within the mp3 file, which is then used when listeners download the podcast to iTunes (or any other client that reads ID3 metadata), two is the data I enter into PodPress and can be similar if not the same as the data entered as ID3 tags, but which is not read by iTunes, but by other RSS readers such as you mention. ?

Thank you for your patience, I may yet come to use PodPress in an understanding way rather than good luck.

Best wishes,

Anthony

will do thanks – wondered what that was.

Here is the exact place – also not showing my mug shot, but pp image instead.

https://www.anthonymellor.com/Snapshot.jpg

The above is not yet published, sitting as a draft in WP.

I am of course perfectly happy to ack pp.

Anthony

Tim,

I think you explain the settings well enough in themselves, it is the “first time user” (i.e. me) who lacks the big picture, the context.

You used a great expression in your reply above where you said “Don’t do that unless you know that you want to do that”. You go directly to the core of my trouble, not being at all clear what I want to do to achieve my goal – and of course I risk breaking things in the process.

I have unchecked “premium feed”, which was checked by me in an attempt to solve my little issues described above.

I don’t think I would suggest you change anything in the settings; merely add some overview guidance at the beginning of each section answering that question about whether I want to use or change anything therein, making clear where sections start and end as you do with the ones that collapse/expand.

Pixels. Just love “pixels”. Have no idea what they mean and how to get a picture to be this or that many pixels in any direction. Black magic to me. Is it file size related? I guess not. All this in the context of many years playing with images.

I have used “Tax, Accounts …etc” as a standard description in every box because I have no idea which descriptions will appear where and in what circumstances, and indeed they have not appeared where I was hoping in any case.. I think.

I don’t know which of my feeds is registered with the iTunes store because I was not aware I have more than one. (Making me quite without hope I know).

I can see from the cover art link you gave me that it is not updating podcasts as I had hoped, so presumably I have mixed my feeds? I have only one podcast series I am aware of, so any others are simply me not knowing which is the correct description of a feed (there are so many!).

“Only the iTunes Store uses the image URL which you have defined as itunes:image for the page of your podcast”

ok, I achieved that by luck rather than good management. Did I do that in iTunes or in Podpress?

I had found the “cover art add” in iTunes, but while it shows on my own iTunes client version of my podcasts I have no way of knowing if it goes anywhere else? I’d like the same image on everything, frightening though it is to young children and animals (edit for readers: this is a humourous reference to a photo of myself as seen aside this post)

“
but still descriptions […] do not appear.

Why do you think that? Where do the descriptions not appear? (the descriptions of the episodes or the description of the feed?) “

This is upon pressing the tags button that shows underneath each WordPress page, where it says updates may be slow if loading from remote sites.

I hope the above helps us both, I have tried to describe for you the “first time user” experience for myself as I know it can be very useful to a developer who can never be a first time user and yet strives to make it easy for us; which is a tall order.

The fact I have a podcast “out there” is a credit to your work, as I am also a new WordPress user to boot.

Anthony

Hi Tim, are you the author? (if you are I just want to say nice things about your prog)

I believe I have done what you describe, indeed I have looked over and over and no joy just yet. Probably missing the obvious; but cannot see for looking.

As a complete first time novice I can let you know that the settings page is very easy to use, but confuses me about when or even if to use each section and to what each section is supposed to relate. This last is probably because the intended purposes are not recognised or known by me (yet).

Thank you very much for your reply and so quickly.

Anthony https://mellor.co