Unquiet Desperation

A good friend has been having an issue setting up their podcast for premium content using the podPress plugin for Wordpress. After a bit of digging, I’ve found a couple of interesting things which point to why it’s failing.

podPress depends on PHP being installed as an Apache module, rather than running as a CGI, because it uses the HTTP authentication headers to log users in to Wordpress before generating the premium feed.¹  Unfortunately for my friend, her host (Dreamhost) is running all PHP instances as CGI for security reasons. Once upon a time, they would let users turn this off and just run as a module, but those days appear to be long gone.

Podpress is looking for the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION header in the request headers for the premium feed. I found this odd, and am now wondering how old this code is. The docs list the proper $_SERVER variables as PHP_AUTH_USER and PHP_AUTH_PW. I cannot find another reference for the HTTP_AUTHORIZATION headers except for use in IIS:

Another limitation is if you’re using the IIS module (ISAPI) and PHP 4, you may not use the PHP_AUTH_* variables but instead, the variable HTTP_AUTHORIZATION is available. For example, consider the following code: list($user, $pw) = explode(‘:’, base64_decode(substr($_SERVER['HTTP_AUTHORIZATION'], 6)));

Why is the code in podPress IIS specific? That’s a little weird.

Anyway…in the current state, it seems impossible to use podPress’s support for premium content on Dreamhost. If you;’re planning on launching a poscast with premium content, be sure to test this on your host. YMMV.

1. See the docs: http://us3.php.net/features.http-auth[back]

I’ve been waiting a while for this, but Earl Newton and his team have pulled it together and made it happen. Stranger Things has just issued it’s premiere episode: “Sacred Cow”, based on a short story by Scott Sigler.

In a word….DAAAAMMMMNN.

Welcome to the cutting edge…the place where folks with talent can create something that will, in time, put network television to shame. Stranger Things is a show that has that sort of promise.

The story in “Sacred Cow” is the tale of Father Ralph, a pastor at a small Catholic Church in the country. His ward, Gordo, has developed a machine that allows him to see and videotape prayer energy. Together they find out just where it goes after it is released from the church…much to their shock and horror. (This is, after all, a Sigler story.)

The actors portraying Father Ralph and Gordo are superb. The effects are realistic, neither too flashy nor cheesy — the editing managed to hit a sweet spot with the CGI. The audio is solid, and the camera work is outstanding.

I’m hooked.

It’s my sincere hope that this is the future. It’s time for us to move beyond ten-minute vidcasts into the world of real storytelling. Earl Newton and his team provide that and much more…the promise of better things to come.