Making the Screencasts (Part 3: Turning your screencasts into a podcast)

• Posted January 26th, 2009
• By Adam Darowski (bio)
• Filed under: How We Do It, Technology

This is the final post in a three-part series about how I made the BatchBook Screencasts. In Part 1, we recorded the screencasts. In Part 2, we encoded the screencasts and embedded them on the web. Today, we’re going to take your screencasts and turn them into a video podcast. We’ll also submit the podcast to iTunes.

Making the screencast into a podcast

First of all, what exactly is a podcast? Sure it’s audio, and you can subscribe to it, but really… what is it? Luckily, we included “Podcasting” in our glossary of tech terms!

Podcasting is a kind of audio broadcasting that uses the Internet, like an on-line radio show. The name was created by combining “iPod” and “broadcasting”. Podcasting involves making one or more files available in an RSS feed. A pod-caster (the creator of the podcast) makes a list of music and/or other audio files and makes the list available for other users to retrieve.

So, once you have a few audio or video files, all you need to make them into a podcast is an RSS feed. That’s what your listeners/viewers can “subscribe” to in an RSS reader or podcasting client (such as iTunes).

What’s an RSS feed? That’s in the glossary too!

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. An RSS feed is a document that contains either a summary of content from a web site or the full text of a website. RSS feeds makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites automatically rather than checking them manually.

What does an RSS feed look like? It looks a lot like an XML document (because it is an XML document!). Here’s an example of a feed—our BatchBlue News RSS feed (truncated after the first news story):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>BatchBlue News</title>
<description>News updates from BatchBlue Software, LLC</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com</link>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<lastBuildDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:21:00 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:20:14 -0500</pubDate>
<generator>FeedForAll Mac v2.1 (2.1.0.1); http://www.FeedForAll.com/</generator>

<item>
  <title>BatchBlue Launches New Social CRM Solution Specifically for Marketers: BatchBook for Marketing</title>
  <description>New BatchBook for Marketing Includes Functionality to Manage Queries from Peter Shankman's Popular Help a Reporter Out (TM) Service</description>
  <link>http://batchblue.com/pr-090122-batchbook-for-marketing.html</link>
  <guid isPermaLink="false">BF056ABF-4EAA-4872-8FC5-247166D68DBE-3971-000031C872E078D5-FFA</guid>
  <pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2009 11:21:00 -0500</pubDate>
</item>
...

Looks scary, huh? If you look carefully, it makes sense… the “channel” is what the feed is about (in this case “BatchBlue News”). There’s the date last updated, link to the feed’s author, some technical jargon, etc. An “item” is an individual entry (or in this case, a news story). Each “item” has a description, a link, a date, etc.

Luckily, you don’t have to edit this by hand. There are some nice tools out there to help you do it. The one I use is called FeedForAll. Specifically, I use FeedForAll for Mac ($40).

The interface is much less scary. In fact, it’s downright inviting. Here’s the “channel”:

And an individual item:

So, that’s an RSS feed. But there’s one more thing needed in an RSS feed to make it a podcast: an enclosure. In a podcast feed, each “item” will contain not only a <link> but an <enclosure> (a link to the actual media file). What’s the difference? When a podcast episode is published, it will often be posted on a web page or blog. The <link> is that page. The <enclosure> is a direct link to the media file (audio or video) itself. That way, podcasting clients such as iTunes know what file to download.

Here’s an example of an item from our screencasts feed. The screencasts have an <enclosure> (the video file) as well as a <link> (a direct link to that video on our screencasts page).

<item>
<title>Manage your contacts and social network</title>
<description>Manage your contacts and social network</description>
<link>http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts.html#contacts-video</link>
<enclosure url="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/contacts.m4v" length="8750577" type="video/x-m4v"></enclosure>
<guid isPermaLink="false">0BB7B405-54E1-4BD3-85D8-9E43757ED8A7-29077-00011275E171D3F1-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:05:32 -0500</pubDate>
<itunes:subtitle>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:summary>
<itunes:duration>00:03:56</itunes:duration>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
</item>

Getting the podcast on iTunes

The first thing everyone wants to do when they get a podcast is submit it to iTunes. Why? iTunes has the largest, most popular podcast directory built into the application. You can submit your podcast to get it listed on iTunes. An iTunes listing looks like this:

To submit your podcast, open iTunes. Then go to the iTunes Store. Choose Podcasts. Near the bottom, you’ll (eventually) find a “Submit a Podcast” link. That will bring you to a screen that looks like this:

That’s all it takes to actually submit your podcast. Within a few days, it will be approved.

Now, there are ways to enhance your feed for iTunes, to make it look better. iTunes uses a slew of additional tags for the RSS feed. For example, here’s the “channel” for the screencasts feed:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>BatchBook Screencasts</title>
<description>BatchBook is an easy-to-use customer relationship manager (CRM) designed for small business owners. The BatchBook Screencasts will show you the ins and outs of using BatchBook.</description>
<link>http://batchblue.com/screencasts.html</link>
<copyright>2006-2008 BatchBlue Software, LLC</copyright>
<docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs>
<language>en</language>
<lastBuildDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:33:55 -0500</lastBuildDate>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 22:33:44 -0500</pubDate>
<generator>FeedForAll Mac v2.1 (2.1.0.1); http://www.FeedForAll.com/</generator>
<itunes:subtitle>BatchBook Screencasts</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>BatchBook is an easy-to-use customer relationship manager (CRM) designed for small business owners. The BatchBook Screencasts will show you the ins and outs of using BatchBook.</itunes:summary>
<itunes:category text="Technology">
  <itunes:category text="Software How-To"/>
</itunes:category>
<itunes:keywords>small business crm, contact management</itunes:keywords>
<itunes:author>BatchBlue Software</itunes:author>
<itunes:owner>
  <itunes:email>adarowski@batchblue.com</itunes:email>
  <itunes:name>Adam Darowski</itunes:name>
</itunes:owner>
<itunes:image href="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/itunes.png" />
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
...

As you can see, the iTunes info contains such data as a summary, categories, contact information, artwork, and more.

Here’s an example of an “item” in an iTunes-optimized screencast feed:

<item>
<title>Manage your contacts and social network</title>
<description>Manage your contacts and social network</description>
<link>http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts.html#contacts-video</link>
<enclosure url="http://www.batchblue.com/screencasts/contacts.m4v" length="8750577" type="video/x-m4v" ></enclosure>
<guid isPermaLink="false">0BB7B405-54E1-4BD3-85D8-9E43757ED8A7-29077-00011275E171D3F1-FFA</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 21:05:32 -0500</pubDate>
<itunes:subtitle>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:subtitle>
<itunes:summary>Manage your contacts and social network</itunes:summary>
<itunes:duration>00:03:56</itunes:duration>
<itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
</item>

Thankfully, we don’t have to edit that by hand either. FeedForAll can handle iTunes data just fine. Here’s the interface for adding “channel” information:

And here’s the additional info for an “item”:

Every time you add a new item (or episode, or screencast), simply update the feed and iTunes will automatically update as well.

And you’ve done it!

If you’ve followed along since the first post, you’ve got a bunch of screencasts, they’re embedded on your site, they’ve got a feed, and they’re listed in iTunes. Sweet! I hope you found this series helpful!

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Tags: enclosure, FeedForAll, how-to, itunes, podcast, rss, screencasts, tutorial, video