Open letter to other podcasters
Drawing heavily on an RSS rant I went on months back, this note is to implore all podcasters to do one simple act: subscribe to your own feed.
I can’t tell you how many times (well, it’s been four) I’ve had to contact podcasters and say “Dude, the links in your feed? They don’t work. Fix them.”
And don’t just look at your XML and say “Oh, lookie. A media file!” Not good enough. Paste that very link in your browser and see if it plays. But don’t stop there. Take the 3.2 seconds and paste the XML of the feed into your reader. THEN LEAVE IT THERE. Don’t unsubscribe immediate so you “don’t taint the numbers”. Please, you narcissist.
When you upload a new show, check to make sure you got it. Play the file, if only on your computer, and make sure it sounds good and is appx the right length. You don’t have to listen to the whole thing, just enough to make sure you didn’t screw something up.
OK. End rant. Back to work. I expect all of you to increase your subscriber base by one in the next five minutes.
March 29th, 2005 at 8:16 am
For that you would have to sent me 3 subscribers for my Useful Sounds feeds. :o)
March 29th, 2005 at 9:09 pm
Heh, Evo said “taint.”
March 30th, 2005 at 11:34 am
As one of those who was, ahem, screwing up I’ll say: “Listen to the man!” Subscribe to your feed and test everything. And for heaven’s sake, don’t assume that just because something like feedvalidator.org says your feed is right, that it actually *is* right.
Feedvalidator will only confirm your RSS is parsing correctly; it won’t tell you if the links inside the feed are broken (which ::cough:: was my problem).
Listen to Evo. Subscribe. Test. Repeat.