PoducateMe: Practical Solutions for Podcasting in Education
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Advanced Feed Techniques
At this point, you have a number of URLs to juggle. These include:
1.
your students and whomever else you’d like to provide details about your
podcast.
2.
will be referenced by FeedBurner and should not be used for subscription to the
podcast unless you forego the step in which you run the feed through
FeedBurner and submit it for inclusion in the iTunes Store.
3.
feed you’ll submit to the iTunes Store and provide to students so that they can
subscribe to the podcast.
The only feed that you’ll ever change is the blog feed. Every time you make a change to
your blog by adding a new episode or deleting an existing one, the blog feed will
automatically update to reflect those changes. In addition, because FeedBurner is
grabbing that blog feed, it will also be automatically updated to reflect changes to your
blog. Finally, because the iTunes Store is grabbing your FeedBurner feed, it will also be
automatically be updated with new content. Thus, updating your blog will affect three
separate feeds (blog, FeedBurner and iTunes Store).
iTunes One Click Subscription
Many podcasters aren’t aware of this, but you can create a link that allows iTunes users
to directly visit your iTunes Store detail page. This feature was demonstrated at the
beginning of this guide (see the iTunes chicklet in Figure 2).
To obtain the iTunes Store link for your podcast, control + click (or right click in Windows)
the album art (D) displayed on your iTunes details page, as shown in Figure 126. This
action will allow you to click a Copy iTunes Store URL option. Next, paste the URL in a
sticky note or somewhere you can access it later. The URL will look like this (but the id
number at the end will be different):
You can also offer a direct subscription link to the podcast, if you’d like. This type of link
will bypass the details page and directly subscribe a user to the podcast. Of course, the
user must have iTunes installed for this to work. Direct subscription links can be made by
using the link format of itpc://FEEDURL, where FEEDURL is the URL for your feed. Thus,
the direct subscription link for AHPY would be itpc://feeds.feedburner.com/ahpy.
Your iTunes Store detail page link and your iTunes podcast direct subscription link can
be included in your blog, Web site or even pasted into emails. Just remember that the
user must have the iTunes application installed on his computer for these links to work.
