There’s a chapter in my book called Launch Your Podcast where I talk about how to choose between a hosted and independent solution to publish your podcast.
A hosted solution is similiar to what Libsyn or Podomatic offers – a place you can get your RSS feed, podpage and hosting all wrapped into one.
An independent solution is where you can choose where to host your podcasts, what blog platform to use for your podpage and that you can customize the look and feel of your podpage to mirror your brand.
I know, I know, it’s not as cut and dry. I know that some hosted services do allow you to modify their template and that if you only want to use them to store your podcasts, that’s fine too.
That’s not the point of this post.
As I’m typing up the benefits of using an independent solution, one that I can think of is that you can write your own RSS feed, use the one that came with the blog, or use Feedburner. As I look at my statement, I’m now wondering what is the benefit of writing your own RSS feed.
Anyone care to weigh in?
Jason is right, there’s no benefit.
I think this is a huge difference between eg. WordPress and making your own feed file. Whenever there is anything wrong with the feed, WordPress makes for me, I have no idea how to fix it, since php is not really my ballgame 🙂 – whereas an ordinary feed, which I often make for my clients for their websites are so easy to fix and validate.
I can think of a few benefits of writing your own feed file:
1. A headache
2. Wasted time
3. Frustration
4. …
…oh wait. You said “benefits”.
In all seriousness, I have never had reason to create a purely “hand-coded” feed, but I have worked with customizing the WordPress feed file to do creative things such as the example mentioned by Steve. Even when getting creative, hand-coding doesn’t seem to be the solution. It would be much better to customize a dynamic feed file in a platform such as WordPress.
Interesting. Thanks Steve. That brings to mind a problem I’m having with a client’s feed. iTunes says it’s already submitted, yet the podcast doesn’t appear anywhere in the directory. We fixed the feed a couple of times and still it doesn’t appear. That’s another benefit to being able to create and manage your own feed – you can fix any problems.
Here’s one advantage to being able to customize your RSS feed: I want to make sure that my promo clip, rather than this week’s edition of my show, is what they hear when they click on the listing in the iTunes Music Store interface. To make this happen, I have to keep my promo as the first item in the RSS file, always appearing before my current show.
I did this by editing the RSS template in the Blosxon blogging software I’m using, rather than by hand-coding a new RSS file every week. I’ve never seen an out-of-the-box software or a hosted-service solution that made this possible.