Tips for Podcasters

Here are some tips for Podcasters to make the listening experience a bit more user friendly:

  • Number your episodes sequentially. This makes it easy to determine if I've missed an episode and helps sort them in my media library and my playing device.
  • Include the episode number in the first 10 characters or so of the title tag. Most media players do not have a lot of screen real estate and it can be very difficult to select the right episode without this information early in the title. Check out the Tips from the Top Floor feed; each of the episodes starts with tftf## title making it extremely easy to sort and view them in my iPod. Boardgames To Go also does a good job in this area, while the Dice Tower has been inconsistent in their title tags (though they do keep the episode number). GeekSpeak (BoardGameSpeak?) uses date information in the title but I would rather see them go with a format like bgs## - Show Title instead. Dates are better left in the RSS or Atom tags, which leads to my next point...
  • Include the pubDate tag in your feed! If you do this, you don't need to put it in the title. The Dice Tower needs to add this to its feed.
  • There are a number of iTunes-specific RSS tags that are probably worth considering if you want to play well in their classification scheme.

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