Friday, July 29, 2005

Getting There from Here

With the frantic growth of all thing podcasting there has come about a plethora of paths to get to the same things. Each path might be more to the liking of some. Here are some ways to get all the shows posted here automagicaly...

1) The raw RSS - The source of it all, a simple rss file that you podcatcher parses. Works great, easy to write in a text editor...nah lets complicate it with all sorts of doodads..

2) Feedburner - One of the early "we take all the grunt work out of podcasting for you" services, Feedburner grabs the RSS feed and wraps it up in a nice looking page. The big deal here is the podcaster gets to see all sorts of statistics for the people who get their podcast via Feedburner. If you can navigate apache logs though it gets you the same thing, less pretty pictures but the data in the raw.

3) Odeo - This service is building up an easy to use interfaces for both publishers and listeners. Somewhere down the road I can hear the jingle jangle of the NickleAndDime bag; folks are convince that they can make money out of anything that gets splattered on the interwebthing(tm).

4) Web Based Flash Player - don't even want to download the files to your computer while you slumber in peace? Ok, this handy dandy little flash app will suck the rss file thru webjay.org and then play the files thru a piece of code on a web page. It even gives you the option to grab the file for keeps if you like what your hearing.

5) Podcast Alley - This is the "Vote for me PLEASE!!!!!!!" website for podcasts. Podcast Alley wraps the feed in a couple of different ways, lists the shows, and then ask folks to vote for their fave podcasts. Its this last part that has driven this site, folks love to be validated with big number hugs and warm smooches of acceptance. So go vote for the Jean Shepherd Fatheads Podcast, come on ya know you want to be part of the ground swell, to say "Hey I was listening to that before it was all cool and hip to listen"....yeeesh gawds, can you imagine what Shep's rant on this would be?:)-

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