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Techie Post: iTunes Podcasting gripe/rant

This is another of my Techie Posts where I take a few moments to discuss technical item that I feel is important. Today I want to rant/gripe about iTunes and it’s (in)ability to properly adhere to RSS standards.

Specifically, my gripe is that there is no good way to track how many and what users access your podcast content. This is due to the fact that iTunes does not allow you to access content via a redirected URL.

Basically, on the clcchurch.com Sermon Podcast I have an ASP file that a user requests and passes a variable off to in order to redirect it to the appropriate media file. Well, given that we have quite a few listeners and the files can get rather large I am working on a way to get the sermons mirrored on other servers to ensure we don’t saturate/flood a source with too many requests. So this ASP file determines based on a set of rules as well as checks and measures which download source it should use. This file also does some additional tracking for our purposes so we are able to measure how popular each of our programs are.

Well, right now our stats are only for content downloaded from all sources other than iTunes .

While I’m at it, I’d like to gripe about the iTunes Podcast directory submission process. This is one of the more cumbersome processes I have ever seen. My major gripe is that Apple provides (or at least I couldn’t find out from apple) NO validation script for the feeds to ensure they meet their ridiculous standards. Then, once you are finally able to get a file that meets there standards it takes seemingly forever for the feed to get listed.

Anyway, hopefully someone from apple will read this and recognize the need to make some changes in the file types they allow the reader to access. Either that or provide some ingenius way for us to track content accesses.

I’ll get down from my soapbox now, but if you’d like to check out all the work that has been done for the sermon podcast, you can access the content at:

http://www.clcchurch.com/sermon-podcast-itunes.asp

This works great in iPodder and works (so-so) in iTunes.

Until later,
Chris

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