It sure is wonderful when other people do your work for you …
Yesterday I posted about iTunes RSS funkiness, and some of my pain in attempting to support it. Well, I use WordPress to create this blog, and I thought that before putting myself in for a world of XML hurt tonight, I’d check for any new plugins for iTunes RSS customization.
Lo and behold, I found WP-IpodCatter.
It’s not well-documented – well, it’s not documented at all. Here’s the extent of the documentation:
The WP-iPodCatter plugin help podcasters running WordPress create a valid feed for iTunes’ podcast directory and specify the itunes:category and itunes:explicit tags on a per-episodes basis.
But installing and using it is fairly straightforward for anyone who has a modicum of web experience. The one piece that I’m still a little on a wing and a prayer yet about is the $baseURL variable that the author, Garrick Van Buren, added. I suppose it means the base URL of your podcast directory, and that’s what I’ve put there.
In any case: very cool. This enabled me to get my second The Linguist podcast up and running, and hopefully is a little more iTunes-friendly than this:
Note the missing subtitle, missing logo/icon, etc. That should now all be fixed … as soon as the iTunes music store spiders The Linguist again.
I resubmitted the podcast, just to try to see if I could speed the process, but iTunes recognized that it had already been posted, and wouldn’t let me either re-post it or edit the original posting.
Ah well, I’ll check it in a day or two.