Podcast Test

Catholic Answers now has a podcast feed up. Before we roll it out, though, we need to make sure that we’ve got the bugs worked out of it.

Could some of y’all check it out and let me know in the combox whether you encounter any problems?

Thanks much!

HERE’S THE LINK.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

34 thoughts on “Podcast Test”

  4. I’m working on the podcast feed for Catholic Answers. I’m interested in:
    1 – how well the feed works as a podcast;
    2 – how well the feed works with your iTunes set-up; and
    3 – how to fine-tune the tag content for mp3 players (iPod, etc.)
    Thanks in advance,

  5. So are you making the .mp3 link go away? I hope not. .xml doesn’t do anything except stare at me.
    [rant]
    I listen to podcasts all the time, I have a podcast, but I don’t have any kind of consolidator or iPod or subscriber machine or whatever. (Nor am I all that fired up to do so. Every time I’ve tried any kind of consolidator software, it tries to eat the rest of my machine and change all my preferences every time I turn it on.)
    And of course, the people who put their podcasts in those weird iPod file formats make their podcasts totally inaccessible, so I hope you’re not doing that.
    [/rant]

  6. For Brian:
    If you don’t have a feed reader, most browsers will just display the feed’s xml code with some very simple formatting.

  9. Works for me in iTunes and the tag information all looks good.
    By the way it would be great if they would add the artwork into the mp3 file. This is how album art is displayed in progams like iTunes and it could either always use a Catholic Answers piece of art or use the same pictures for the show that they currently used when you click on the episode in CA’s calendar page.
    By the way great work Geoff! Many of use have been waiting for this feature for quite a while. Since I listen to every show I would check the calendar page multiple times to see if they had the latest shows yet.
    Even better once this gets into the list of iTunes’s podcasts I am sure it will rise to be one of the top shows which will be great for evangelism.

  10. I just subscribed to the feed, and am downloading podcasts now. So far, so good!
    I’m glad you’ve gone ahead with this. I’m an occasional listener, and don’t always have time to go to the site and check out the schedule. This way, iTunes checks it automatically, and I can quickly see from the title index whether I want to download a particular show or not.
    Thanks!!!

  11. Everything worked great for me.
    Note: The description column in Itunes reads “Got Questions? Get Answers! Catholic Answers!” which may be just fine, but the listener can’t determine what the shows content is or who the guest might be before you actually listen to that program. …….Thank you for doing this. I can’t tell you how much work this will save me in downloading the files and then transfering them to Itunes.

  14. For Chris (re: redundant itunes “description”)
    What would be better?
    How about the guest name?
    Let me change it and you can give it a try.

  16. Geoff, I use Mozilla & all I get is a documentation tree. What am I doin’ wrong?
    Can’t wait to use iTunes to subscribe to CA:Live! But Mozilla makes it really easy, anyway – at least for a bear of very little brain like me!
    Thanks for your work, Geoff!

  17. If you want to use Mozilla (or Firefox anyway), the best way would be to add the feed as a live bookmark.
    Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks
    File -> New Live Bookmark
    Then paste the url to the “Feed Location” box. That will add a dynamic list representing the feed in your bookmarks.
    However, as the feed is currently structured, each link will only take you to the About page at CA Live. I suppose it might be a nice touch to change the link elements for each show to point to the web page for the that show; or the mp3 file itself. That way people would have the option of using live bookmarks as their aggregator…
    Easy for me to say, since I don’t have to maintain it, eh? ;->

  18. I added the link to iPodder and it worked fine. I was surprised that the link had a php suffix instead of xml but it worked fine.

  19. Yes, the feeds come up as live bookmarks in Firefox, but only go to the “About” page, as Brent points out. I’d love to use this, but it’s apparently only useful to those who have iTunes. Which I’ll never have or use.

  20. Subscribed & downloaded episodes fine using itunes 6.0.3.5. Revised descriptions are very helpful.
    I’d second the request on the artwork.
    All in all nice work – thx!

  21. RE: Firefox “live bookmarks”
    Hmmm. The easiest thing would be to change the link to the radio calendar page, instead.
    Pointing it to a show page which includes audio links would seem to be ideal but much more work if it is to be automated.

  22. OK, it’s me. I forgot about the “Live Bookmark” thing. Thanks, Brent.
    And the URL works just fine in iTunes. This is very exciting!

  23. For Geoff,
    Your right that the description column would be redundant, but only if you maintain an “Artist” column as one views podcasts in itunes. I don’t. My comment is based on the way I use itunes. So you should ignore my comments if others use itunes differently. I do like the change you made but might suggest descriptions that say something like, “Dr. John Wilke talks about……” Keep up the excellent work.
    Chris

  24. Having never subscribed to a podcast before I felt like a doofus until I finally figured it out. Works on my work laptop iTunes, which is exactly what I wanted. (I don’t plan to use my iPod to listen.)
    ‘thann

  25. /wr to the description, since the “artist” column doesn’t show up by default in itunes my guess is that most folks won’t have it turned on. Therefore, as long as the description includes the artist (with or without more stuff) that’ll probably be pretty helpful.
    Also still voting for the cover art embedded in the mp3s (itunes compatible)! 😉
    As for good examples of complete, clean, simple & easy to use Fr. Roderick’s SQPN podcast site in general and the Daily Breakfast pcast in particular are worth checking out.
    Thx again.

  26. Currently the CA radio dept does not maintain a short description of each show (e.g., Dr. John Wilke talks about…”). That may change in the near future, but that’s whole ‘nuther subject.
    As a result, I’m presently working with relatively limited info about each show. The RSS and iTunes tags are populated with either static information (e.g., the “about” page link), or dynamic info pulled directly from each mp3 file (e.g., “album” and “artist”).

  27. RE: cover art embedded in the mp3s
    Not sure what the issue is here.
    Can graphics be embedded in MP3’s?
    They can in AAC audio (m4a, m4b).
    Are you referring to associated album art in the xml feed? The current feed has album art associated with each show.
    Not sure why it is not showing in iTunes (if it should). I’ll have to research that one.

  29. It works in my iTunes–running on “wine” (a Crossover Office trial) under Linux, but I might not have this set up for long.
    Truth be told–I don’t like the iTunes program because I find its menus counter-intuitive. Neither does my husband. It takes me longer than it should to figure out where-to-find-what, and if I’m away from iTunes for a while, then I forget where things are within its menus. For example, I wouldn’t put “Subscribe to podcast” under “Advanced”. That makes no sense. That’s the last place I looked. A right-click menu on the Podcast directory at the left, or a right-click menu within the Podcast panel on the right, or a little icon placed there saying ‘Subscribe to a new podcast’ would make much more sense, I’d think. I’m so glad I don’t use a Mac; I’d go batty. (I’m building an old one, though, and putting Linux on it) 😉
    Are there any other programs that will subscribe to podcasts and let you check off shows you’d like to retrieve, and dload them for you? I see my RSS reader subscribes to it but then I only get a little summary with a link and that’s it.
    Not mission critical, I know. Just thought I’d ask. A better-than-iTunes cross-platform clone of iTunes would be neat.

  30. Ah, I found out about “Songbird”. It will be available for Mac and Linux soon and it’s already available for Windows. Maybe that’ll be my answer.

  31. I rearranged the links a little.
    The individual “item” links point to the CAL calendar page.
    But the CAL channel link still points to the “about” page.
    I still have to work on pointing the show item to its associated individual show page.

  32. I manipulated/compressed the iTunes Title field to accommodate display on an iPod. The format is:
    CAL yymmdd guest; title
    where:
    “CAL” – the acronym for the formal name of the broadcast, leads off to allow quick recognition in the small iPod display; and
    “yymmdd” is the date of the show (not the “release date” displayed in iTunes.
    These 2 items will always be immediately visible when browsing through the files on an iPod.
    At least 6 characters of the guest name will also be visible on iPods with the 18 character-wide displays. I went with the guest name here rather than the individual show name because many of the shows are similarly titled (Q&A Open Forum comes to mind). The guest name offers at least the possibility of recognizing the specific show without having to scroll through the entire title.

  34. I just got Amarok today for SUSE 10 and it subscribes to it just fine. I’m listening to a show now. Very exciting to be able to do this, without having to visit a website! Thanks!

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