ITauthor

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Rather like the difficult fourth album, this, the fourth itauthor podcast, has been long in the making.

Well, actually the reason for the long gap between podcast 3 and this one is partly because of Christmas and partly because I just haven t got round to it. But here it is, started on January 31st, so technically January's podcast, in this episode I talk about Madcap Flare and why I think it might be the replacement for RoboHelp, but probably won't be the technical authoring application we've all been waiting for.

Once again thanks to everyone who has pinned themselves on my Frappr map (www.frappr.com/itauthor).

Tech authoring products mentioned in this podcast:

• Help Manual Help Studio
• Document! X
• Doc-To-Help
• WebWorks
• ePublisher Pro for FrameMaker
• AuthorIT
• FrameMaker
• RoboHelp
• Arbortext Editor
• XMetaL Author

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In which I talk about my attempt to upgrade Plone.

For details of what I did (step by step) see:

www.itauthor.com/authtools/plonezope/upgrading-to-2.1.1

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In which I break Russell Beattie s golden rule of podcasting by talking about podcasting.

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I've got the day off today (using up my annual leave before the end of the year). So I decided to have a go at creating a podcast for myself.

By the way, in yesterday's posting I said I was using Lemon, which "used to be called iPodder". Scratch that. It's now called Juice, but it used to be called iPodder Lemon. Apparently, Apple issued a cease and desist notice to iPodder telling them to change the name to avoid any inference of a connection between them and Apple (see http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27684).

After reading around the subject of publishing podcasts I decided to give dircaster a try. My reason for choosing dircaster was its simplicity. It's a PHP script and basically all you do is put it in a podcasts directory on your web server and then upload your MP3 podcast files into the same directory and the PHP does all the RSS stuff for you. If anyone out there has subscribed to the RSS feed for your podcast channel they get to see the new editions when they update (which is usually a scheduled operation). In other words, by simply uploading the MP3 files, your listeners get access to your new podcast via their podcast client or aggregator. The version I installed was dircaster 0.4e. See www.shadydentist.com/wordpress/archives/2004/12/23/dircaster-v04-podcasting-php-script I made the recording for my first podcast using my PDA, I then cleaned up the recording on my Windows laptop using Cubase, saved it as an MP3 then used WinSCP to move the MP3 file to the podcasts directory on my Linux Web server. If you want to listen to my first podcast (or any subsequent ones I might have done since writing this), go to http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor and click on the "Listen" button. Alternatively, if you want to subscribe to the podcast feed using your podcast application, just do the following:

In Juice:
1. Click the Subscriptions tab.
2. Click the Add New Feed button (+).
3. Paste the following into the URL field: http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor
4. Select the "ITauthor" subscription.
5. Select the Episode to download.
6. Click the Check/Download Selected Feed button (V).
7. If you've set up the Preference to play the download right after it's download you'll hear the podcast. If not, double-click the podcast edition in the Downloads tab.

In Apple iTunes:
1. Select Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast.
2. Paste the following into the URL field: http://feeds.feedburner.com/itauthor
3. Double-click ITauthor in the Podcast list. It works!

If you want to try creating your own podcast feed there's an excellent article called Where to Submit Your Podcasts: Best Podcast Search Engines and Directories on masternewmedia.org that contains a long list of podcast directories you can submit your feed URL to. Another useful thing to do is to ping audio.weblogs.com each time you publish a new podcast. You can do this using the form at: http://audio.weblogs.com/pingSiteForm