Tag Archives: itunes

Other Podcast Directories

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I’ve just had a frustrating time trying to submit the podcast to directories other than iTunes.

Out of the ones suggested by podPress, only one was accepting links and that came up with a registration error.

There are lots of podcast directories out there, but I’m really not convinced that any of them are widely used. And certainly not worth a long trawl through to collect a few listeners each.

For this particular podcast series, I’m convinced that iTunes is the right directory, and that other people will find it through recommendations from the HEA and their lecturers. I’ll better spend the time working on publicising the availability of the podcasts here and in iTunes myself.

Podcasts Showing On iTunes

The podcast feed has been accepted and the podcasts are starting to show up iTunes.

Here’s what a the page on iTunes looks like when you subscribe to the podcasts with most of them visible:

List of podcasts in iTunes shown for subscribers

And here’s the iTunes preview if you’re thinking about subscribing.

iTunes previous page for Professional Online Presences podcasts

It is currently showing the wrong number of episodes, but I understand that iTunes corrects itself over time.

The previous page, and the link to more information in iTunes itself, can be found at:

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/professional-online-presences/id869563062

Submitting The Podcasts To iTunes

What a challenge!

I’m at the stage now with a full set of podcasts all recorded as MP3 files.

But it has taken a full day of technical challenges to get the feed (which currently contains the first podcast) submitted to iTunes.

Here’s the process I’ve been through.

I set up another WordPress installation on the server, with a small amount of information, installed the usual plugins and spent quite a while on the server .htaccess to make this play nice with this current blog.

Then I installed podPress and created a post with my first podcast. Lots of settings to get right.

Some information about the podcast series set up for the iTunes feed in podPress

After that, I went to my existing iTunes account and tried to get it to accept my feed. Several of the feeds produced by podPress would not validate, and nothing would go through iTunes.

Went through lots of forum questions with people having their own set of problems.

Eventually got it working after moving around many settings and going for the most basic feed (the blog url with just /feed afterwards).

Now to wait and see if iTunes will accept the podcast, after which I will put the rest live.

I’ve decided not to link to the blog, as it’s mainly there just for hosting and I have different plans for making resources for Professional Online Presences available through the main site.

At this stage, I can’t recommend self-hosting and podPress as the best way to put up podcasts, as so much depends on technical expertise and seems server specific. And, I haven’t even scratched the surface with this one (simple podcasts, no traffic and statistics recording etc).

On the positive side, I’ll personally feel more comfortable setting things up if I do a follow-on series of podcasts, so this has been a useful (if frustrating) learning experience.

The Podcast Cover

Every podcast needs to have a cover photo to be submitted into iTunes. Here’s the one that I came up with after a few hours on Paint.net.

It’s not as eye-catching as many of them out there, but I think it suits the needs for this project.

The top half is a word cloud, made using one of my favourite resources, wordle.net.

The bottom half is a stock photo from rgbstock.com.

For the word cloud, I just took all the text that’s been posted on this blog to date. Therefore, the word “professional” is separate to the other words in “Professional Online Presence”, but in this case, I think it works.

The cover image also looks okay when it’s scaled down to icon size, which is needed for the PodPress WordPress plugin amongst other sites, which is good.