In this video we will send our feed to FeedBurner for some final touches including some iTunes requirements, and also gather statistics about our podcast.
In order to use FeedBurner, you'll need to have a google email address. If you don't have one, just head over to gmail.com and click "Create an account".
- Go to "http://feedburner.com"
- Login using your google email address and password
- Type your podcast url into the field
- Check the box next to "I am a podcaster!"
- Click "Next"
- This title is used for FeedBurner only, and won't actually change the title in the feed
- Just to demonstrate, I'll add "(FeedBurner)" to the title
- And below that you have the feed address. This is the address that you'll want to give iTunes, as well as anyone using podcast software other than iTunes.
- I like it, so I'll leave it alone and click next.
Ok, so now our Podcast is live at "http://feeds.feedburner.com/SuperSweetAwesomePodcast"
I'm going to click next, and walk through their setup process.
- On this page, you can choose what to create an enclosure for… I just leave this set to "any rich media file"
- Next, we can include iTunes podcasting elements
- Category: Technology
- Subcategory: Software How-To
- (iTunes only supports one set of categories, so theres not much reason to use additional categories)
- Subcategory: Software How-To
- Podcast image location
- (This is how we are going to set the image for the podcast its self. This image will be the image people see when searching for your podcast. I'll create one real quick and upload it to my site.)
- Once you've got that uploaded, type in the url of the image file, and click "Preview Image" just to make sure it's working.
- Podcast subtitle
- * We can override the subtitle here. I'll go ahead and do that so that you can see what happens.
- "Podcast subtitle in FeedBurner"
- * We can override the subtitle here. I'll go ahead and do that so that you can see what happens.
- Podcast summary
- We can also override the summary. I'll do this too, just to show you what it looks like
- "Podcast summary in FeedBurner"
- We can also override the summary. I'll do this too, just to show you what it looks like
- Podcast search keywords
- FeedBurner will strip all punctuation from the keywords, so you can't group phrases like "Modules Unraveled".
- Drupal Podcasting Modules Unraveled
- FeedBurner will strip all punctuation from the keywords, so you can't group phrases like "Modules Unraveled".
- Podcast author email address:
- This is optional, and I'll show you where this is used after we finish setting up the feed. I did read somewhere, that if you don't enter anything they will automatically insert a placeholder email address.
- "brian@modulesunraveled.com"
- This is optional, and I'll show you where this is used after we finish setting up the feed. I did read somewhere, that if you don't enter anything they will automatically insert a placeholder email address.
- Include "Media RSS" information
- This doesn't hurt anything, so you might as well leave it checked
- Contains explicit content
- Choose "Yes" or "No"
- Copyright message
- Enter an optional copyright message (When viewing the podcast in the iTunes store, the copyright message is displayed right below the image)
- Podcast Author
- Enter your name or your organizations name (I'll show you where this is used along with the author email address in just a minute)
- Category: Technology
Click next to move to the next page
I check all the boxes on this page. It doesn't hurt the feed, and you'll get more stats.
- Clickthroughs (This will track clicks back to your site. This will redirect all links through FeedBurner, so if you want to leave your links untouched, don't check this box.)
- Item enclosure downloads (How many downloads each episode has)
- I want more! (This will track popularity of individual items, and the number of people viewing and clicking content in your feed)
- Click next, and we're done!
In part 6 we will explore FeedBurner and how it has enhanced our podcast.