My Church Gig

I get asked about podcasting a lot: how to record, how to edit, how to sweeten, how to compress, how to set up a feed… There’s a lot to it if you want to do it well. If you Google around you’ll find some great resources and it’s easy enough to figure out.

We moved our website to another server this week. Last time we did that (a couple years ago) moving our Podcast RSS feed was a big pain. (The RSS feed is just a shopping list your iTunes checks occasionally to see if there’s anything new to download.) So last time I set up a Feedburner feed in anticipation of ever having to go through it again. I’m pretty thankful to my past self right now for one of the few favors that guy ever did me. By the way, be kind to your future selves. They’ll need all the help they can get. They’ll love you for it.

Feedburner’s free features (like stats) are mindbottling enough but the real beauty for me is that it acts as a proxy feed. Once people subscribe to the Feedburner feed you can move your original feed anywhere without losing subscribers. That’s important because we care very much about quality and, really, we don’t have time to field support calls and emails from hundreds of subscribers having podcast trouble all at once. Also, if your feed goes MIA for too long the iTunes store will drop it. There are ways to move your feed with iTunes (using the tag and pinging iTunes) but it doesn’t work as well or as quickly as you’d hope.

So, no matter where you set up your podcast set up a Feedburner account right after you get your base feed going. I recommend this even if you are using a hosted solution like GoDaddy, Podbean, MySpace or whatever. Burn that feed.

I’ll post more about podcasting in the future but if you have any questions or need advice don’t hesitate to email me: just ’sam’ at this website url.

Screen shots and stats after the jump for anyone interested.

Above are Cornerstone’s burned feeds and subscriber count. The subscriber counts vary from day to day but our main Mobile Message feed hovers around 240 subscribers.

Above are stats for the last month.  The blue line is our “reach” and the green line are our subscribers.  Not shown are the list of the most downloaded files for the month.  Those are usually the most recent files.

Above is why I love Feedburner so well.  The feed address everyone subscribes to is http://feeds2.feedburner.com/CornerstoneFellowshipTheMobileMessage.  The original feed is our actual feed which will live temporarily somewhere else.  We can point that at our new sermonplayer.com feed or continue to maintain it manually.  We’re still deciding.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 10:24 am and is filed under podcasting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.