I'm once again looking into using Posterous for podcasts. I see from the FAQ that they do them, but the question is, can it fit into our process for RBTN. Which goes like this...

1. Jay creates a post but it's not published. The post contains the items for this week's show. We go back and forth, then we do the show, and after it's over, he does a light edit to reflect what we actually talked about.

2. I prepare the MP3 that Adrian, our engineer, gives me. That means verifying that you can hear us talking, adding metadata, and uploading it to mp3.morningcoffeenotes.com. It's really important that all the MP3s be served out of the same folder. I've learned the hard way that if you don't do that, a few years later half your shows are somewhere else that has gone away or you don't remember where you put them. So I keep disciplined. This means that uploading the MP3 to Posterous is not an option.

3. Then I add the MP3 link to Jay's blog post so the CMS can scrape it. It's a totally wrong UI, but I didn't have any say in it, so don't blame me, I'd much rather just enter the URL in a dialog and have the CMS render it as an icon that communicates clearly to the user what's going on. Having an in-browser player is a pretty good idea too, and would just make our UI match that of the professional sites. All of these guys make us look bad, but meanwhile we've been upgrading the production of the show, and I think we've gotten a lot better at what we do. While this is happening our technical team (wordpress.com) has been making us look worse and worse. I know Matt's a business guy, this is a business issue. We care about our users, but we can't do it if the tools vendors don't care about theirs (i.e. us).

Anyway, I haven't really figured out how to or if I can make this work with Posterous.

Wordpress, Tumblr, Posterous.. are there other choices? Is anyone out there in PodcastLand happy with their CMS? Please let me know.

 11/23/2010; 12:32:00 PM.   .

As you may know, I do a weekly podcast with Jay Rosen called Rebooting The News.

This is a heads-up to people who subscribe to the podcast. There is a problem with the feed that will cause some subscribers to not get every episode. (It could be a majority of subscribers not getting any episodes, depending on how their clients are programmed.)

Technical: The problem appears to be caching. After a post is published, it builds the page, and caches the HTML. Somehow this is done before it realizes there is an MP3 attached. Eventually the cached feed expires, it rebuilds the feed, and now the MP3 is linked in as an enclosure. How long before this happens and how many clients have read the post and stored the guid and assume there is no MP3? Unknown. But a correctly written client that scans frequently will miss the MP3. My client does, for example

Until this problem is fixed, you should manually visit the site periodically to see if there's a new MP3 available and download it to to your listening device.

This is a repeat of a problem that hit our podcast in the beginning of the year. It was fixed, the feed was working properly for a few months, but it's broken again. The Automattic people are aware of the problem, and hopefully will have a fix soon. As I understand it, all podcast feeds on wordpress.com are broken, btw -- so if you're hosting a podcast there, you should be aware of the problem.

We continue to use WordPress because Jay is very comfortable with it. We checked out Tumblr, and it's not any better at podcast support than WordPress is.

A personal note, none of these programs work as well as the tools we had when podcasting was booting up in 2001-2004. Had our tools been this bad, there would be no podcasting, I'm sure of it. As these services have scaled, important features are breaking. This of course totally sucks.

 11/23/2010; 9:03:38 AM.   .