How to publish a better podcast using Tumblr, Textpattern, or anything else

This isn’t about equipment or recording technique, but just the cranky details of publishing a podcast that I have found by trial and error. This article assumes you have some basic computer/web/HTML know-how.

I publish a couple of podcasts: Howell Creek Radio uses Textpattern, and Anything Good uses Tumblr. So in some of the steps I have given some examples that are specific to those CMSs, in order to help you along; but the important thing is that these steps can be easily adapted to any CMS such as Blogger, WordPress, etc.

Create a separate tag or category for your podcast posts on your blog.

This is optional; I recommend it because it allows the website for your podcast to be more flexible. For example, if you use Tumblr, you can create a podcast tag, and then continue posting a mix of videos, photos, quotes, etc. alongside your podcast episodes. This way your podcast subscribers will get a clean feed containing only audio downloads, while your website readers will be able to see all your other posts as well.

Even if your website is pretty much exclusively a vehicle for your podcast, you may want to publish other kinds of things posts now and then for administrative purposes, and this will give you the freedom to keep those posts separate.

Make sure you have cover art where you need it

You need to create and use cover art in two places: first you create cover art for your podcast as a whole, and then you also embed cover art in every individual podcast recording. If you use nothing else from this article, please: add cover art to your mp3 files. Without it, your episodes show up with blank covers in iPods and most mp3 players! Your podcast episodes will look dorky without it! It’s not enough to add cover art to your itunes feed, you need to embed the cover art in every finished mp3 file. This is easy to do, yet many beginners forget to do it.

Set up your podcast feed with cover art: Create a 600×600px cover art image for your podcast and upload it to your site, or somewhere publicly accessible. (In some places Apple says 300px is OK but their technical spec says 600.) I recommend using JPEG<, not PNG — the latter is allowed but will look blocky when viewed at reduced sizes in iTunes.

1. Get a FeedBurner account and set up your podcast feed:
   1. Tumblr: Set the “original feed” on FeedBurner to the RSS feed for the specific tag you created for your podcast. To get this feed, add tagged/YOURTAG/rss to your tumblr’s address. (Example: http://mytumblr.tumblr.comn/tagged/podcast/rss)
   2. Textpattern: Set the “original feed” on FeedBurner to Textpattern’s atom feed for that category (e.g., http://foopaux.com/atom/?category=podcast).
   3. Blogger: Set the “original feed” on FeedBurner to http://www.YOURBLOG.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/PODCASTTAG (per these instructions from Google).
2. Under FeedBurner’s Optimize tab, add the SmartCast service to make your feed podcast-friendly. Set the cover art to the URL of your covert art image and add as much description, keywords and categories as you can muster.

Embed cover art for individual episodes: You’ll find that iTunes does not automatically use your cover art for downloaded episodes when they are playing in your iPod. The cover art you created in the steps above is only used in the iTunes store listing for your podcast (if you get one). In order for your cover art to actually display in people’s iPods when your episodes are playing, you need to embed the cover art into each episode’s MP3 file. Luckily, this is easy to do using only the iTunes (the simplest way I know how):

1. Prior to uploading, open add the episode’s MP3 to your iTunes library.
2. Right-click the episode in iTunes, click Get Info.
3. Go to the Artwork tab, manually add your cover art to the file, and click OK. (Tip: in Windows you can actually copy/paste the artwork JPG file from Explorer directly into this tab.)
4. The cover art is now embedded, you can now upload your MP3 file.

Create a “subscribe” link on your website.

Lots of folks use iTunes, so it’s nice to provide an iTunes instant-subscribe link for them and a standard RSS link for everyone else. To create an iTunes link, just prefix the URL of your FeedBurner feed with itpc:// instead of http://. So, for example, you could place this prominently on your website:

Subscribe in <a href="itpc://feeds.feedburner.com/MyPodcast">iTunes</a> or <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyPodcast">RSS</a>

Record and upload your podcast episodes

I use Audacity to record, then upload the MP3 to my website using FTP. If you don’t have any hosted space, you can use a free Dropbox account and host your files in a public folder. The bonus with this approach is that uploading is automatic.

Format your podcast posts properly

A properly-formatted post ensures that your subscribers will get their episodes automatically with no hiccups.

1. Don’t forget to set the post’s category (or tag) to the podcast category you created earlier.
2. Each podcast post should contain a manual, direct download link to the MP3 file for that episode. This is non-optional, and it should be the first link in the post. This will allow FeedBurner to correctly detect and include your audio in the podcast feed. For the text of the link, I recommend something like “Download MP3 audio (14.76 mb, 19:32)”
   (Update, Sep 13, 2011: this link doesn’t have to be at the very front of your post, it just has to be the first link in the post. Also, when using Tumblr, to ensure cleaner descriptions see this follow-up post.)

3. One nice thing to do if you will be syndicating onto another service, such as Facebook notes etc., is to create a special CSS class called for-syndicate and set it to display: none. Then add a little “helper” boilerplate on the bottom of each post, in a paragraph set to that class:

   <p class="for-syndicate">This is a podcast post: <a href="http://site.com/episode.mp3">click here</a> to download the MP3 audio, or visit <a href="http://site.com/podcast">site.com</a> to listen online and subscribe in iTunes.</p>

   The for-syndicate class will render the paragraph invisible on your website, but it will be visible when imported into Facebook or when the feed is viewed in a newsreader, since these other sites do not import your CSS styles. (If you like, this quasi-hidden paragraph can also serve as the required MP3 link.)

Letting people listen from your website

People will listen to your podcast in one of two ways: by subscribing in iTunes or some similar program (which we’ve already covered) or by going to your web page and listening on their computer. Although they can click to listen to the MP3 file using the link you provided, it’s nice to embed some kind of player that will stream the audio and let them listen right there.

There are lots of ways to do this:

1. In Textpattern, install the jnm:audio textpattern plugin and include a <txp:jnm_audio> tag in each podcast post.
2. In Tumblr, create your podcast post as an “audio post” and Tumblr will automatically embed an audio player. (Don’t forget to also include the download link in the text portion of the post though.)
3. Other platforms (WordPress, etc): Let me know how you do it in the comments!

These methods use Flash programs for the audio players, which don’t run on iPhone or iPad browsers. I’ve been tinkering with ways to use HTML5 audio players when the browser supports them, but HTML5 audio support is still flaky for the time being. Check back again in a year or so and maybe I’ll have something for you.

Get listed in the iTunes Store

After you’ve gotten your production groove down and can demonstrate that your episodes come out at least somewhat regularly, it’s worth trying to get your podcast added into the iTunes store. Read Apple’s FAQ for Podcast Makers.

Free Kindle Book: Back On Murder

J. Mark Bertrand, having just released Pattern of Wounds , the second in a series of mystery novels, is giving away the Kindle edition of Back on Murder (the first book in the series) for free for a limited time.

I have not read either yet, but I have downloaded the free ebook and will be reading it as soon as I can! I’m always on the lookout for new reading material and thought I’d pass this on.

J. Mark Bertrand is also known as the writer of Bible Design Blog, which centers around reviews and features of very high-quality Bibles and book-making in general. It’s actually a rather interesting subject even if you are not religious. See his announcement about his novels here.

The 50 books every child should read - With Kindle Links

The Independent recently asked three of Britain’s leading children’s authors and two of their in-house book experts to each pick 10 books, suitable for Year 7 students. Their original list is here.

Unfortunately, in typical traditional-media fashion, they neglected to add any links to any of the books mentioned, losing an obvious opportunity to use the web to both their readers’ and their own advantage. So I have gone through the list and added links to the Kindle editions of every book for which one is available.

I linked to a free edition wherever possible. If a book was not available on the Kindle store, I marked it with an * asterisk. If you know of a Kindle version of a book I could not find, or of a free or better-formatted edition than the one I have linked, let me know via email or comments!

Philip Pullman

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Indispensable. The great classic beginning of English children’s literature.
• Pinocchio (free) by Carlo Collodi. What effortless invention looks like.
• Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner. A great political story: democracy in action.
• Swallows and Amazons * by Arthur Ransome. As clear and pure as Mozart.
• Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken. If Ransome was Mozart, Aiken was Rossini. Unforced effervescence.
• The Owl Service * by Alan Garner. Showed how children’s literature could sound dark and troubling chords.
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster. Superb wit and vigorous invention.
• Moominsummer Madness * by Tove Jansson. Any of the Moomin books would supply the same strange light Nordic magic.
• A Hundred Million Francs * by Paul Berna. A particular favourite of mine, as much for Richard Kennedy’s delicate illustrations (in the English edition) as for the story.
• The Castafiore Emerald* by Hergé. Three generations of this family have loved Tintin. Perfect timing, perfect narrative tact and command, blissfully funny.

Michael Morpurgo

• The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson. The heroine is blessed with such wonderful friends who help her through the twists and turns of this incredible journey.
• A Christmas Carol (free) by Charles Dickens. The first few pages were so engaging, Marley’s ghostly face on the knocker of Scrooge’s door still gives me the shivers.
• Just William books by Richmal Crompton. These are a must for every child.
• The Happy Prince (free) by Oscar Wilde. This was the first story, I think, that ever made me cry and it still has the power to make me cry.
• The Elephant’s Child * from The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. The story my mother used to read me most often, because I asked for it again and again. I loved the sheer fun of it, the music and the rhythm of the words. It was subversive too. Still my favourite story.
• Treasure Island (free) by R.L. Stevenson This was the first real book I read for myself. I lived this book as I read it.
• The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. A classic tale of man versus nature. I wish I’d written this.
• The Man Who Planted Trees* by Jean Giono. A book for children from 8 to 80. I love the humanity of this story and how one man’s efforts can change the future for so many.
• The Singing Tree* by Kate Seredy. The story of two children who go to find their father who has been listed missing in the trenches of the First World War.
• The Secret Garden (free) by Frances Hodgson-Burnett. I love this story of a girl’s life being changed by nature.

Katy Guest, literary editor for The Independent on Sunday

• Refugee Boy * by Benjamin Zephaniah. Story of a young Ethiopian boy, whose parents abandon him in London to save his life.
• Finn Family Moomintroll* (and the other Moomin books) by Tove Jansson. A fantasy series for small children that introduces bigger ones to ideas of adventure, dealing with fear, understanding character and tolerating difference.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid * by Jeff Kinney. It’s rude, it’s funny and it will chime with every 11-year-old who’s ever started a new school.
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith. Written for a teenage audience but fun at any age.
• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein. Be warned, these tales of hobbits, elves and Middle Earth are dangerously addictive.
• The Tygrine Cat * (and The Tygrine Cat on the Run) by Inbali Iserles. If your parents keep going on at you to read Tarka the Otter, The Sheep-Pig and other animal fantasies, do — they’re great books — also try Iserles’ stories about a cat seeking his destiny.
• Carry On, Jeeves * by P.G. Wodehouse. A grown-up book ? but not that grown-up.
• When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr. Judith Kerr’s semi-autobiographical story of a family fleeing the Nazis in 1933.
• Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. Elaborate mythological imagery and a background based in real science. If you like this, the Discworld series offers plenty more.
• The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson. The pinnacle of the wonderful Jacqueline Wilson’s brilliant and enormous output.

John Walsh, author and Independent columnist

• The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (free) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Irresistible puzzle-solving tales of the chilly Victorian master-sleuth and his dim medical sidekick.
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Age-transcending tale, both funny and sad.
• Mistress Masham’s Repose * by T.H. White. Magical story of 10-year-old Maria, living in a derelict stately home, shy, lonely and under threat from both her governess and her rascally guardian.
• Little Women (free) by Louisa May Alcott. Inexplicably evergreen, trend and taste-defying 1868 classic.
• How to be Topp * by Geoffrey Willams and Ronald Searle. Side-splitting satire on skool, oiks, teechers, fules, bulies, swots.
• Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz. First of the action-packed adventures with 14-year-old Alex Rider.
• Private Peaceful * by Michael Morpurgo. “Dulce et Decorum Est” for pre-teens.
• Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer. Lively, amoral, wildly imaginative debut (six more followed) about the money-grabbing master-criminal Artemis, 12. The author called it “Die Hard with fairies.”
• The Silver Sword * by Ian Serraillier. Inspiring wartime story of the Balicki family in Warsaw.
• Animal Farm (free) by George Orwell. Smart 11-year-olds won’t need any pre-knowledge of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and 1917 to appreciate this brilliantly-told fable.

Michael Rosen

• Skellig * by David Almond. Brings magical realism to working-class North-east England.
• Red Cherry Red * by Jackie Kay. A book of poems that reaches deep into our hidden thoughts but also talks in a joyous voice exploring the everyday.
• Talking Turkeys by Benjamin Zephaniah. A book of poems that demands to be read aloud, performed and thought about.
• Greek myths * by Geraldine McCaughrean. Superheroes battle with demons, gods intervene in our pleasures and fears — a bit like the spectres in our minds going through daily life, really — beautifully retold here.
• People Might Hear You (Viking Kestrel picture books) * by Robin Klein. A profound, suspenseful story about sects, freedom and the rights of all young people ? especially girls.
• Noughts and Crosses (free) by Malorie Blackman. A book that dared to go where no one thought you could with young audiences because it raises tough stuff to do with race.
• Einstein’s Underpants and How They Saved the World by Anthony McGowan. A crazy adventure set amongst the kids you don’t want to know but who this book makes you really, really care about.
• After the First Death by Robert Cormier. Cormier is never afraid of handling how the personal meets the political all within the framework of a thriller.
• The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd. A book that allows difference to be part of the plot and not a point in itself.
• Beano Annual. A cornucopia of nutty, bad, silly ideas, tricks, situations and plots

* — not known to be available as an ebook.

How to get more use out of your Kindle

So you’ve had your Kindle for a few months now, and it’s been sitting in your pack, unused for the last few weeks. What happened? Here’s how can you get more use out of this gadget you used to be so excited about.

Ask it to do less. With its apps and its web browser, the Kindle is technically capable of many things, but great for only one thing: reading. Reading, you may recall, is a wonderful pleasure that may have gotten pushed out of your life awhile back. Use your Kindle for reading more. Resist the temptation to use it for things that will tend to marginalize reading again: games, email, and so forth.

Use the magic wirelessness to your advantage. There is really no good reason to be in the habit of plugging your Kindle into anything (other than to charge it up once or twice a month).

Here’s how I manage my ebook collection wirelessly:

1. To put an ebook on my Kindle, I email it to my free.kindle.com address (a snap since Gmail accepts drag-and-drop attachments). Presto, book appears on my Kindle.
2. When I’m done with a book, I either delete it from my Kindle or put it in a “Finished” folder in my Kindle.
3. Gmail keeps a copy of the file in the email attachment in case I ever need it. (I also stick them in a folder on my computer.)

Using this method, there are no wires, no syncing, and there’s no need for special software like Calibri unless I need to convert an ebook to a Kindle-compatible format.

Make finding new reading material as automatic as possible. Time spent looking for new stuff to read is time you could have spent reading. Find ways to have the world send you new things, rather than digging for them yourself. This one is something I am continually looking for improvements on. Some options:

• Delivereads – This is a new one, and it’s just the kind of thing I’m looking for: free, high-quality stories delivered automatically to your Kindle, roughly once a week. This one is almost a no-brainer.
• Instapaper – Even though Instapaper is having some problems with automatic deliveries at the moment (which will probably be fixed before too long), if you do any browsing on the Internet in the course of a normal day, Instapaper makes a great way to collect long articles for later reading. Just try and use it as a stash for things you already run across; don’t start crawling the web just to look for Kindle material – you’re trying to get away from that, remember?
• Newspaper subscriptions: Try a subscription to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Currently the reviews are very mixed; as of today you can see that not everyone finds these subscriptions worth the cost compared to the print editions. It will depend on the publication and whether you have the time to read all the issues.

Treat Twitter like a newspaper. One good use I have found for the web browser is to use it to log into m.twitter.com. This is an excellent way to catch up on Twitter. You can now check it once or twice a day at home as part of your morning or evening routine, and forget about it for the rest of the day. (Unless you happen to be stuck in a queue or waiting room with nothing but your smartphone.)

Start or join a book club. The ideal book club will center around a specific kind of book, and send you a new book every month automatically. This is just an idea of mine – I haven’t yet run across a book club like this – but it makes so much sense it’s hard to believe they don’t already exist.

Instapaper Auto-send to Kindle not working

This is a current, unresolved problem: Instapaper does not automatically send new articles to my Kindle every day. This, despite the fact that my Instapaper account is correctly set up to auto-send new articles to my Kindle, and my Kindle account is properly set up to receive them.

Here’s the scenario:

1. There are new unread articles in my Instapaper account that are more than a day old.
2. My Instapaper account is configured to email new articles to my Kindle every day (see above). I have a Kindle 3 wifi-only.
3. I never receive any emails from Instapaper unless I click the Send Now button. Then, the new Instapaper issue is sent and arrives on my Kindle exactly as expected.

The manual sends arrive just fine; ergo: the Kindle email address is properly configured, and the Kindle account is properly set up to receive the emails.

The status just above the Send Now button commonly reads “Your last compilation was sent 4 days ago” even when there are new unread articles sitting in the account.

I conclude that Instapaper simply is not sending the emails for some reason. Any guesses as to why?

Update: Apparently this is a known issue; Wired published an article which says “Unfortunately, for reasons I’m not smart enough to understand, Instapaper can’t automate delivery to your @free.kindle.com address.” This tells us nothing about what causes the problem, only that it’s a known issue and, for whatever reason, nothing has been done about it.

Second Update: — Marco seems to have been working on the problem. On May 25, @Instapaper tweeted: “Sending tomorrow morning’s Kindle auto-deliveries early, now. I think I finally found the bug that prevented so many from being delivered.” Then on May 26: “@jeremyisweary Have you changed your Instapaper username since setting it up, possibly when I moved to requiring emails-as-usernames?” The problem has not yet been solved for me personally, or for others, as seen in the comments to this blog post. Will keep you posted.

Third Update: — I’ve been receiving my unread articles from Instapaper on my Kindle, and it seems the problem has been fixed. On October 5th 2011 (the day Steve Jobs died), @Instapaper tweeted that Marco believed he had fixed the problem. The same day, he said, “By a few hours from now, all deliveries should be made. If you’re one of those who haven’t been getting them, let me know whether you do.” I’ve been getting my deliveries ever since, and so have others.

If you’re still having problems, let us know in the comments!

Windows 7 updates keep installing, restarting and failing

Over the past week and a half, my Win 7 laptop has been trying to automatically install the same set of updates and failing over and over again. Sometimes the automatic install/restart cycle would happen in the middle of the night when the dumb thing was supposed to be sleeping. It would restart, say “Configuring Windows Updates”, then “Updates Failed, Reverting Changes” (or something like that).

The update history showed they mostly failed with error 80071A90. The help file on that error recommended running Windows Update manually after starting Windows in safe mode with networking, but the Windows Update service will not run in safe mode.

I found the solution in this Microsoft Answers article:

Assuming the updates-in-question include KB2515325, KB2492386, KB2506928, KB2512715 and/or KB982018 & all is well with your computer otherwise:

1. Run a manual check for updates per http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/How-can-I-tell-if-my-computer-is-up-to-date
2. Select (check) only KB2515325, KB2492386, KB2506928 and/or KB2512715 & install them; follow all prompts.
3. Now run another manual check for updates, if necessary, and install KB982018 by itself; again, follow all prompts.

Delicious Linkrolls Not Working

I wanted to create a linkroll on my website, an embedded list of my delicious.com links. Problem was, the linkroll code they generated resulted in…nothing. No links appeared on my website using their code.

I tried manually opening the URL in the script tag, which refers to a feeds.www.delicious.com address, and the browser told me it couldn’t find the site!

On a whim I tried removing the “www” from the address, and voila. The script worked. So when you add the code to your site, change feeds.www.delicious.com to feeds.delicious.com.

I have sent a support request to Delicious about this and will update the post when I hear back from them.

Update, June 2011: I don’t know if they've fixed it yet, but after recent developments threw the future of delicious into doubt, many of us have switched to Pinboard. Their linkroll code also happens to work perfectly, you can find the javascrip widget on their resources page.