The Quicky Podcasting Guide

Creating a Podcast Feed


Once you have your content created, you will have to store it on a web server somewhere. It's not important where, since the podcast feed will keep track of it for the user. But how do we create the podcast feed?

A popular way to do this is by using blogging software such as google's blogger, which creates a (non-podcastable) feed that can be translated automatically at a site called feedburner into a podcast. There is a very nice step-by-step tutorial on-line that I won't duplicate here, but I will point out a missing step: Before creating your first blog entry in blogger, you must click on the "settings" tab and select the "formatting" subtab and set "show link fields" to "yes". If you are broadcasting less than a few hours of audio per month or don't mind paying a monthly fee for a higher storage limit, podbean.com is a nice one-stop service for creating your podcast and hosting your files.

A more efficient way to generate your podcast feed is with astand-alone podcasting application such as podcast maker or profcast (mac) or Snapkast (windows). The following instructions are for podcast maker, but would be very simmilar for any other podcasting applicaiton.

Select "New Podcast" from the file menu. This will create a new podcast series that you can later add "episodes" to. Fill in the required data about your podcast in the "basic" and "detail" tabs. The website you enter will be the one that subscribers are directed to for related content.

To add content to the podcast select "New Episode" and select your media files, or just drag them into the episode list. Fill out the description using lots of relevant words that will match users likely search terms.

When you are finished, select "Publish" and set up a server to publish it to. This can be any web server you have access to and the program can automatically transfer your files via ftp if you give it the required server name, account and password info. Otherwise you can publish to a folder and copy that to the server yourself. Finally save your podcast. This actually only saves the file that podcast maker uses to remember the settings of the podcast. When you are done select "Copy RSS feed URL" from the edit menu to get the address of your new podcast!