ITauthor

I noticed yesterday that the ITauthor podcast seemed to have disappeared off iTunes. Searching for "itauthor" failed to find anything, likewise searching for "technical writing".

So I've resubmitted the RSS feed and hopefully it will show up again soon. Looking for the podcast yesterday just reminded me how bad the iTunes is at helping you discover new podcasts. Basically it's okay for the most popular podcasts in each category, because these get listed, but there's no way of finding anything else unless you happen to know what you're looking for and can search for it by name - which makes you wonder how any other podcasts can shift the incumbent most popular ones when nobody can find anything else.

I'm a huge admirer of the iPod user interface, but the interfaces for the iTunes application and the iTunes Music Stores are really very poor. The store looks nice, but it's not nice to use. The iTunes application doesn't even look nice.

Anyway, for my own reference, I came across a couple of useful tips:

1. If you have iTunes installed, clicking the following link pulls up the ITauthor podcast page in iTunes:

http://www.itunes.com/podcast?id=289204946

2. To ping iTunes to tell it to update from the published feed, click:

https://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/pingPodcast?id=289204946