I spent the weekend figuring out how to get my Minechat vodcast (do people use this word?) episodes listed in iTunes so people can subscribe to them there.
It wasn’t easy.
But I got there and this is how I did it!
I want my videos on Youtube, it’s a popular place for people to go and watch videos right?! Unluckily you can’t just put a Youtube URL in to iTunes when submitting a podcast, it’s just not going to work. It’s not a feed. Darn.
I also want to post my YouTube vodcasts on here, my WordPress blog. It’s where I put stuff I want people to see! It wasn’t until I looked into the whole WordPress angle that I found the solution to my problem. A simple WordPress plugin called Powerpress. It basically creates an RSS feed URL (you have to fill in a number of boxes along the way) that iTunes will acknowledge as good enough for submission to its hollow grounds. So it generated for me edutechniques.com/?feed=podcast that I used to enter into the iTunes Submit A Podcast link on iTunes Store Podcast page. There’s still a catch.
Although you can embed your YouTube code into a post in your WordPress blog that still won’t be enough. You still have to upload your video file someplace on the interwebs. So I uploaded my raw video file to my webspace. If I run out of space I’m sure I could look at Kim Dotcom’s latest venture!
So when I post the latest episode up I get this box under the text entry box:
So I enter the link to the raw video and I also use the Youtube embed code to show the video. It was a long journey of pain and suffering but now after I submitted the RSS feed to iTunes I have our Minechat iTunes Podcast page looking all cool and spiffy!
It was all worth it. I think.