A few weeks ago I decided to embark on a big, year-long blog/podcast project. ( www.AYearOfSongs.org )
I figured since there were a fair number of people doing podcasts that it would be a fairly established field.
Even though I'm a web and database developer by trade -- and I spent the better part of a day or two getting up to speed on RSS ['Real Simple Syndication'] and other XML issues with which I wasn't yet familiar -- I decided to go with all third party tools.
I didn't want to bog myself down in becoming a service provider to myself. If you know what I mean.
I ended up hosting my media on the open-source-open-media community oriented site, www.Ourmedia.org *
I used Google's Blogger.com to write and manage my written blog. And I ultimately decided to go with Feeburner.com as an RSS feed packager.
And I'm basically glad I did.
Yes, Blogger, a web service, is, at times a bit dense about formatting and can get itself fairly confused, occasionally causing me to go in and laboriously hand edit out a whole lot of nasty/redundant/unneeded span tags. OTOH, it does have a fairly usable archiving schema that's a heck of a lot better than doing it all by hand.
And, though I was a bit iffy about Feedburner.com -- at first thinking I'd use Blogger.com's "ATOM" RSS feed -- I found that Feedburner is a nicely rounded suite of webservices that not only helps reduce the pain and suffering of preparing daily RSS feeds -- including the all important but somewhat idiosyncratic RSS coding specific to the iTunes podcast listings. It also provides a number of ways of promoting one's blog/podcast as well as links to important utilities like an RSS feed validator, etc.
Now... despite the fact it seemed like I was doing everything right, it still took more than a few days to get all the bugs out. At first my RSS feed didn't show up in web service newsreaders like my.yahoo. Then I realized I was frozen out of the iTunes listing by problems with the size listed for one of my files at Ourmedia.org. [For some reason it registered as zero length when I uploaded it. I was able to change the length listing by hand on the Ourmedia page (but I had to use the full number of bytes, rather than any KB or MB listing as OM said I could)).
But, eventually, I ironed out the problems, and by the time my blog officially started on the Fall Equinox, I was being listed on iTunes, and within a few days was showing up in My.Yahoo.
(It took a few days to show up in the Google Homepage news aggregator, too.)
I don't use podcatcher software myself, so I'm not absolutely sure if folks have been able to automatically download my podcast media files -- but everything else seems to be in place and working.
Anyhow, I was wondering what kinds of experiences other newbie (or experienced) podcasters have had -- and what software or thirdparty services -- if any (you CAN do it all yourself) they're using and how well it works.
Your experiences -- or questions?
________
* Note on www.ourmedia.org -- it's a great, free resource but it's a very slow responding site, at least as far as their own local web pages go. Visiting their home page or my own page there can be either quick, slow, or it can even time out (and not infrequently, either). BUT I have yet to have a stream or download from their servers (linked in from a third party page) fail. So, while their own pages load slow (if, sometimes, at all), their actual media file servers seem to be fairly dependable. Go figure. (It can make a difference for RSS validation for any feed based on an OM page. My Blogger feed (which has embedded links to media on OM) always validates. But my [separate] Feedburner RSS feed for my Ourmedia page (an unnecessary afterthought, really) often reports time-out related problems. Not a big deal, because I concentrate my efforts on the Blogger page and use Ourmedia as basically a media server.)
I figured since there were a fair number of people doing podcasts that it would be a fairly established field.
Even though I'm a web and database developer by trade -- and I spent the better part of a day or two getting up to speed on RSS ['Real Simple Syndication'] and other XML issues with which I wasn't yet familiar -- I decided to go with all third party tools.
I didn't want to bog myself down in becoming a service provider to myself. If you know what I mean.
I ended up hosting my media on the open-source-open-media community oriented site, www.Ourmedia.org *
I used Google's Blogger.com to write and manage my written blog. And I ultimately decided to go with Feeburner.com as an RSS feed packager.
And I'm basically glad I did.
Yes, Blogger, a web service, is, at times a bit dense about formatting and can get itself fairly confused, occasionally causing me to go in and laboriously hand edit out a whole lot of nasty/redundant/unneeded span tags. OTOH, it does have a fairly usable archiving schema that's a heck of a lot better than doing it all by hand.
And, though I was a bit iffy about Feedburner.com -- at first thinking I'd use Blogger.com's "ATOM" RSS feed -- I found that Feedburner is a nicely rounded suite of webservices that not only helps reduce the pain and suffering of preparing daily RSS feeds -- including the all important but somewhat idiosyncratic RSS coding specific to the iTunes podcast listings. It also provides a number of ways of promoting one's blog/podcast as well as links to important utilities like an RSS feed validator, etc.
Now... despite the fact it seemed like I was doing everything right, it still took more than a few days to get all the bugs out. At first my RSS feed didn't show up in web service newsreaders like my.yahoo. Then I realized I was frozen out of the iTunes listing by problems with the size listed for one of my files at Ourmedia.org. [For some reason it registered as zero length when I uploaded it. I was able to change the length listing by hand on the Ourmedia page (but I had to use the full number of bytes, rather than any KB or MB listing as OM said I could)).
But, eventually, I ironed out the problems, and by the time my blog officially started on the Fall Equinox, I was being listed on iTunes, and within a few days was showing up in My.Yahoo.
(It took a few days to show up in the Google Homepage news aggregator, too.)
I don't use podcatcher software myself, so I'm not absolutely sure if folks have been able to automatically download my podcast media files -- but everything else seems to be in place and working.
Anyhow, I was wondering what kinds of experiences other newbie (or experienced) podcasters have had -- and what software or thirdparty services -- if any (you CAN do it all yourself) they're using and how well it works.
Your experiences -- or questions?
________
* Note on www.ourmedia.org -- it's a great, free resource but it's a very slow responding site, at least as far as their own local web pages go. Visiting their home page or my own page there can be either quick, slow, or it can even time out (and not infrequently, either). BUT I have yet to have a stream or download from their servers (linked in from a third party page) fail. So, while their own pages load slow (if, sometimes, at all), their actual media file servers seem to be fairly dependable. Go figure. (It can make a difference for RSS validation for any feed based on an OM page. My Blogger feed (which has embedded links to media on OM) always validates. But my [separate] Feedburner RSS feed for my Ourmedia page (an unnecessary afterthought, really) often reports time-out related problems. Not a big deal, because I concentrate my efforts on the Blogger page and use Ourmedia as basically a media server.)
Last edited: