What’s Up Doc?

This is from my Vox Blog:

I had some helpful feedback to yesterday’s post. Most of the comments encouraged me to concentrate on my podcast content rather than worrying about its website. I particularly want to thank Rob Walch who is the author of Tricks of the Podcasting Masters for leaving a comment and then answering an email to provide more details.

I want to share what he wrote because it might be useful to fellow podcasting newbies:

First he said:

I would highly recommend going with Libsyn for hosting your MP3 files.

Libsyn is still the best podcasting hosting company out there. They treat their customers great and offer the best service.

I am not affiliated with Libsyn - just a long time customer, Like Ask-A-Ninja, Keith and the Girl and so many others.

If you are not sure about staying with them long term - simply use Feedburner to setup your public feed and reference the one created for you by libsyn.

In answer to my query about the role of Feedburner, Rob gave me this detailed reply:

Lets say you get a Libsyn account. Your feed at libsyn might be

http://myshow.libsyn.com/rss

You could offer that out as your feed, but if you wanted to leave Libsyn and host elsewhere down the line then you would have to get everyone to change the feed they are subscribed to, including all 100+ directories. Not an easy task or one you want to even try.

If you go with feedburner. You can have them point at the Libsyn feed for the information but the public would see the following as your feed.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/myshow

Now down the line you can change where you host your feed and just repoint feedburner to it, and no one will know.

Of course there is always the question of what happens if feedburner goes out of business. That is not very likely - they have received over $10 million in VC funding and they manage over 70,000 podcast feeds and over 200,000 blog feeds.

But if you are worried about that then you can do what I do. I host my XML file on my site and my MP3 files at Libsyn.

So my feed is http://www.podcast411.com/feed.xml and all of my MP3 files sit on Libsyn’s servers. So I get the great hosting and stats of Libsyn but still maintain control of the namespace of my feed.

This is the best road to go. But it requires that you can set up your own site and you can edit an XML file.

Here is a tutorial on creating a RSS / XML feed: http://www.podcast411.com/howto_1.html

So here is a shout out to Rob! Check out his Podcast411 and if you click Here to get his book he’ll get credit at Amazon.com

My goal was to launch my podcast in November, but I have spent the last several weeks reading about web hosting and trying to get a handle on the role of PHP and MySQL in CMS. Yes, I know about Libsyn, but I somehow got it in my head that I needed a real website to host my podcast. Thus, I began exploring how I might “easily” design such a site.

I haven’t done any programing in over 20 years and although I once designed a site with Go Live!™ (I used FrontPage™ for my first website, but let’s not go there!), my current homepage was done in iWeb™ and is hosted on dotMac, so it is not appropriate for a serious podcast.

After sorting out what a CMS (content management system) does, I decided that something like WordPress, which is a blogging tool with CMS features, would probably satisfy my needs. Yesterday I finished reading The Visual Quickstart Quide to WordPress 2, but now I am back to the question of choosing a web host. I was looking at DreamHost, but they seem to have a lot of down time.

GoDaddy!® seems much too commercial, so I am practically back where I started. The truth is I do not want to spend a lot of time on website design, but I would like to do more than I can do on dotMac. Perhaps I should go back to working on the podcast and worry more about hosting when I actually have something that needs hosting.

I would appreciate your comments and suggestions.