Setting up a Feed Proxy Service with PRX

When setting up your podcast on Dovetail, you have the option to connect a subdomain that you own to your Dovetail RSS Feed. This set-up is called a feed proxy, and is a great way to maintain ownership and custom branding for your RSS Feeds.

If you decide to switch distributors away from Dovetail later down the line, you will also have the ability to update the underlying RSS Feed served by this custom subdomain—this keeps your Public Feed URL (and, in turn, your subscribers) in tact during your move.

To set-up a custom domain with Dovetail, you'll need to do the following:

Step 1: Pick a subdomain of a domain that you own to host this feed proxy service

Acceptable Subdomain Examples: 

https://feed.wxyz.org 

https://podcast.morning-news-show.wxyz.org/

https://showname.feed.example.com 

Incompatible Subdomain Examples:

 https://wxyz.org/ — Not a subdomain

 https://morning-news-show.wxyz.org/ — Already used by the show’s website

 https://feed.wxyz.org/podcast.xml — Includes a file path

Please note that while this feed proxy service is in use, that subdomain cannot be used for anything else; the DNS for that subdomain must remain pointing at a PRX-provided DNS record at all times, and the feed proxy service will be the only thing living at that subdomain.

Step 2: PRX provides two CNAME records for adding to your domain host

The first record is created for the subdomain chosen in Step 1 (we'll use the subdomain feed.wxyz.org as an example of the subdomain chosen)

Name: feed.wxyz.org.
Type: CNAME
Target: pf1234abcd.publicfeeds.net. (this is an example value)

The second record is a TLS certificate validation record. This record relates to the internal service we use to generate security certificates. In order for PRX to be able to securely host files at the chosen subdomain, you will need to grant us permission to generate the certificate, since it’s not a domain that we control.

Name: _47cb98e86f7dd1593d5e6927example.feed.wxyz.org.
Type: CNAME
Target: _2570c4223da8f99db070968aff5c7022.example.acm-validations.aws.

Step 3: You add both DNS records that have been provided to your domain host

How these records are created will depend on your domain name service. Often this will be the same as your domain registrar (like Hover, GoDaddy, or Name Cheap—wherever you purchased your domain), but not always. Each system works slightly differently, so check your specific domain name service's support documentation.

Common things to be aware of:

• Many systems will reject a CNAME value (the target) with a trailing period. In those cases the trailing period can be removed without issue.
• Usually when adding a CNAME, the system will expect the root domain (wxyz.org in our example) to be omitted, as shown in the example below. Note how only feed was typed into the box, not feed.wxyz.org.

• The target values should always be entered in their entirety.

Step 4: Once those steps are complete, PRX will confirm record set-up and create the proxy service at the appropriate domain for each individual feed required

If you are interested in utilizing a custom domain and feed proxy, please reach out out to PRX's podcast support team to begin the process.