Last week on the show I told you that Bart, Steve and I were working on a secret project. The big reveal is that we’ve revealed a new podcast: Taming the Terminal! This podcast is the 35 part series (which is actually 40 podcast episodes) originally broadcast as part of the NosillaCast. Steve painstakingly pulled every episode out, topped and tailed it, Bart and I did introductions to it and then we added the awesome logo Steve made for us!
You can find Taming the Terminal in your podcatcher of choice (including iTunes), and the detailed written tutorials and direct download and player links are all over on Bart’s site at http://bartb.ie/ttt. You can subscribe by hand by copying this link and pasting it into your podcatcher: https://podfeet.com/ttt/ttt-rss.xml. Don’t try to CLICK that link, copy/paste is your friend.
Bart and Steve and I had originally thought it made sense to release them a couple a week. We thought that would keep the excitement up, but the downside of that was it meant doing work every week. It meant posting the episodes in the feed, Bart adding the to the already existing tutorial blog posts and marketing them. It also felt artificial to not give them to the listeners if we had them. What if you’ve already heard the series but you want to go back and refresh your memory on PATH or man? You couldn’t do that but there was no reason for it.
This turned into a much harder exercise than I thought it would be. I created all 40 items in Feeder but I’d find a mistake here and there and go back and correct one. I had Feeder set up to auto-create the date of release, and when I corrected some, their release dates changed so they were all out of order! I had to go back in and change the dates by hand, sometimes just changing the minute of release. Finally got them all sorted.
I never mentioned on the show where we’re hosting the audio files for Taming the Terminal. For the NosillaCast and Chit Chat Across the Pond, I’m hosting on a service called Libsyn. This is a service dedicated to podcasters where you pay for how much data you upload within a month. This means that if your show gets wildly famous suddenly, you’re not in danger of losing a house payment, the show doesn’t cost you any extra money.
However, if I’d added Taming the Terminal to it, I’d have had to increase my monthly cost. I decided to try out Archive.org, which is where Tom Merritt hosts Daily Tech News Show. It’s free and I figured if Tom’s listeners don’t overload it, Taming the Terminal should be ok. The interface to archive.org is pretty janky and it isn’t particularly intuitive. I had to redo quite a bit of work there but I managed to conquer it.
Archive.org also makes 11 versions of your file after you upload it. I send up an mp3 but you get an ogg vorbis, a torrent, a variable bit rate m3u file, on and on it goes. Finding the correct link for the file meant clicking on the mp3 and grabbing that. The url’s for the audio files in archive.org are secure, starting with https, but it turns out many podcatchers don’t like https links, so I stripped the https off.
I get metrics from Libsyn on downloads but with archive.org I wouldn’t get those. Blubrry, another podcast service like Libsyn, offers some free metrics collection. If you stick their url in front of the url for the audio, you get that tracking for free. Ok, great. Strip off the s, add the blubrry url in front and we’re in business.
I got everything up in iTunes, spammed the universe, Dave Hamilton told the Mac Geek Gab community about it and everyone’s all excited and ready to learn.
But then this morning I see a message from Bart that some of the episodes are disappearing! He asked me whether there is a permalink instead of the links I was using. Sure enough I found a page on archive.org that explains that WHATEVER you do, don’t use those urls I’ve been using because they are not permanent. Good grief, how was I supposed to know that was even there???
Ok, back into Feeder, copy paste copy paste copy paste… and republish the feed. But guess what else I get to do? Try to find everyone who subscribed to the feed early and tell them to delete it and resubscribe. Two Twitter accounts, two Facebook accounts (plus the Mac Geek Gab Facebook group), LinkedIn, G+…hope I got everyone!
We hope you’ll tell your friends about the new Taming the Terminal podcast!