Move Podcast from MobileMe to GoDaddy

I'm glad you checked, because it looks as if you were about to paint yourself into a corner. You've quoted the web pages for the two versions of the podcast: what matters are the feeds.

The original, MobileMe, feed is at

http://web.me.com/markandjill/SW_Miniverse/Star_Wars_Miniverse/rss.xml

The Godaddy feed is at

http://www.swminiverse.com/SW_Miniverse/Star_Wars_Miniverse/rss.xml

Since iWeb doesn' provide for adding the tag, you are going to do it manually. Please follow these instructions very carefully.

Mount your iDisk on the Desktop (command-shift-i). Open the Web folder, then within that the Sites, folder, then the markandjill folder, then the SW_Miniverse folder, then the Star_Wars_Miniverse folder and locate the rss.xml file. Drag this to the Desktop to download it.

Now open this file in Text edit in PLAIN TEXT mode (not Rich Text which is often the default). Three lines down you will see the <channel> tag. Make a new line beneath this, reading:

<itunes:new-feed-url>http://www.swminiverse.com/SW_Miniverse/Star_Wars_Miniverse/rss.xml</itunes:new-feed-url>

All one line, no returns within it, and I should copy this line to make sure you get it absolutely right.

Save the file as rss.xml - TextEdit will offer to add .txt on the end - don't allow this.

Drag the file to the Star_Wars_Miniverse folder on the iDisk, replacing the existing one. Leave it severely alone for at least two weeks. Do not publish anything from iWeb to the iDisk or you will over-write it.

You can check that it's worked; go to your iTunes Store page at

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/star-wars-miniverse/id326698031

Click the Subscribe button below the image. Go to the Podcasts section: control-click on the line with the podcast name (not an episode) and choose 'Copy Podcast URL'. Paste this into TextEdit - you should see the GoDaddy URL. It will take the Store page a few days to catch up. Subscribers will be automatically redirected to the new feed.

I would advise you to leave the MobileMe site severely alone: you will only run the risk of complications. Once you have put the redirect link into the feed and reuploaded it all your subscribers will automatically be redirecgted to the new one. You could put a notice on the web page telling people to redirect to the new site before you modify the feed; if you do anything to that version of the site in iWeb you will have to go through the whole download, modify and upload process every time you have made a change, because iWeb will remove the redirect tag from the feed.

Hi Roger,

I just had a couple of questions to ask:

I'm moving from Mobile Me to a different provider (Go Daddy in this instance).

Now I have jumped the gun with publishing my site with GoDaddy before putting the redirect in.

I had a question though instead of having to publish it back again to MobileMe:

If the only difference between my feed URLs is one extra directory (I was using personal web hosting with MobileMe).

Could I not just create the extra directory on my new hosted domain and paste the new rss.xml with redirection there?

EG lets say the original was: www.mypersonalwebsite.com/paul/Podcast/rss.xml (copied from iTunes under the copy podcast URL)

and the new location is: www.mypersonalwebsite.com/Podcast/rss.xml

Could I not just create on the root of my site - a paul folder, a Podcast folder, then copy in the new rss.xml with the redirect to:

www.mypersonalwebsite.com/Podcast/rss.xml

One additional question - I copied the whole site straight from my iDisk to GoDaddy.

The site is working but what I can't figure out is that rss.xml file that iWeb creates will still refer to all podcast resources with the additonal "paul" folder.

Do I need to edit the new rss.xml and remove all instances of that "paul" directory everytime I publish the site to a folder?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks for your time.

Paul

You are correct to create the GoDaddy version first as there has to be something to redirect to. However you say you've copied the site directly from your iDisk: this means that all the URLs for the media files are still referring to the iDisk versions (the feed uses the full URL including the server name, not just an relative URL). You should really publish directly from iWeb, particularlly if you expect to go on adding episodes, but if you are proposing to amend the feed you must alter every media file URL to include the full GoDaddy URL. Do I gather that you are using iWeb '08 or earlier, with no FTP facility? - in that case you will have to publish to a local folder, and as iWeb won't know the server name you are going to have to amend the URL of every episode's media file, every time you add one - not just the latest one, but all of them. As I say, they must be absolute URLs, i.e. the full URL including the server name.

You need to identify the URL of the feed on GoDaddy, then insert that URL in the MobileMe feed as indicated in my page linked to above. After that leave the MobileMe feed alone. This will cause iTunes to be redirected to the new feed. The Store should hopefully catch up in the week you have left before the old feed disappears; your subscribers will be redirected next time they check, but any who don't check until after June 30 will lose contact with your feed: you've left it rather late to be doing this.

Thank you very much Roger,

After reading your reply I realised that I was indeed going to be creating a lot more work for myself.

I've now published the site to a folder from iWeb '08 to a folder and used cyberduck to upload that to Godaddy.

I was getting a bit confused with the Godaddy instructions as they said when uploading the iWeb site, upload only the contents of the folder not the folder itself.

But after reading your iWeb section on your website. I thought i'll just copy the index.html and the site name (YWM) folder into Godaddy. (instead of just the contents which was removing my site name directory.)

So my feed URL shouldn't need to change from what it originally was:

http://www.yesterdaywasmine.com/YWM/Podcast/rss.xml

However before I realised this the iTunes store caught on quick about my redirect feed as only a few hours later iTunes had removed the extra subdirectory exactly as I had specified in the new feed url in the rss.xml.

http://www.yesterdaywasmine.com/Podcast/rss.xml

Long story short I realised that when uploading correctly that extra site name folder will in fact need to be there. So I then created another redirect feed point back to the original location, again iTunes took that within 12 hours and everything is working again.

So it's now back to:

http://www.yesterdaywasmine.com/YWM/Podcast/rss.xml

(as confirmed by copying the podcast link from the entire podcast not from an episode)

As you mentioned I'll leave my redirection feed in the "Podcast" folder I created off the web root folder for two weeks just to be sure.

Thanks again for your time and your great website!

Paul