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]

(Originally published on RefreshCleveland)

photo credit: doyoukekko

In the past few weeks, I’ve helped some of my friends move their WordPress blogs to new servers. One of them had a consistent problem with their host because WordPress was hogging cycles on the shared server. We implemented the WP-Cache plugin, and things got better in minutes.

Jeff Atwood has written a terrific article about the perils of using WordPress without caching.

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the whole, the experience has been good bordering on pleasant.

Or at least it was, until I noticed how much CPU time the PHP FastCGI process was using for modest little old blog.stackoverflow.com.

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A week ago, I asked for people to submit some topics that they’d like to hear me write about. Some of my comrades in the Cleveland Programming Wasteland chimed in, wanting to know how I wound up working for Mahalo.

In a word, podcasting.

No, really.

Desperation, Quiet to Unquiet

When the podcasting community started to form in late 2004/early 2005, I was working for a small development firm in Medina. While I enjoyed the work, I wanted to do something more creative in my off time, and because of that, I got into podcasting. My first contact was with Evo Terra, who at that time was the co-host of The Dragonpage. He mentioned his idea for serialized audiobooks delivered via RSS, and dubbed them Podiobooks. At the time, Podiobooks.com was a simple site with five books on the front page.
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It’s that time of year again…when all your friends who want to be writers attempt the nigh-impossible: write 50,000 words in 30 days.

My wife is going to kill me, but I’m going to try it again this year. I’ve succeeded the last two years, but this year….I’m not as confident. Part of it is time commitments, part of it that I want the novel this year to be, well, decent.

What you hear is true: if this is your first year, give yourself permission to write crap. Personally, I believe that if you’ve done more than one, it’s time for the work to stop sucking. I might be a little pretentious here, but I know that I can do better than what I’ve done in the past. Each year, I’ve learned something important about the process. The first, I learned about pacing and stamina…the need to have things unfold gradually, and how to sustain tension throughout the narrative. Last year, I learned about characterization, about creating people who come to life on the page. This year…it’s all about the plot.

Plot eludes me. I can start the story, but I cannot track it, see where it goes, and fill it out. I’m going to be outlining this year and planning things out. Admittedly…time is short for such things, which means that I’ll probably fall behind early. It’s worth not finishing if I can get this down.

**Tools for This Year**

1. [Scrivener](http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.html): J.C. Hutchins turned me on to this program, and it is made of awesome. It is a wondrous piece of programming that has everything you could need…outlining, corkboard, formatting, exporting to specific formats, fullscreen mode, wiki-like linking, folders and formats for templates…everything. It’s well worth the $34.99.

2. [Holly Lisle's Create a Plot Clinic](http://shop.hollylisle.com/index.php?crn=211&rn=375&action=show_detail): [Jason Penney](http://www.jasonpenney.net) recommended this to me, and so far, it’s really quite good. It’s a practical guide to plotting, which is something I desperately need.

3. [The Nanomonkeys](http://www.teampodcasts.net/nanomonkeys): Sure, I might be the guy mixing down all the shows for this daily podcast, but I need the

advice as much as the next guy.

I’m torn on the actually subject matter for the book…I have four different settings to choose from, and two of those are not fully baked yet. The two that remain are Autumn Falls, a midwestern, modern day supernatural fantasy piece, or Sacred Third, which is more of a steampunk piece. I’ll admit my steampunk chops are weak at best, but I have a couple of great characters in mind for there. Autumn Falls is more fleshed out setting-wise, but the characters are flat.

Guess I’d better make up my mind, and quickly. Any thoughts? Please…leave comments.

I’ll be tracking my progress on the sidebar over to the right. Feel free to play along at home.