IN THIS CHAPTER

Moving podcast media files to your web server

Applying artwork

Naming your files appropriately

You've managed to figure out what it is you want to say (or show), you’ve gone through the trials and tribulations of the editing process (or not), and you’ve faithfully employed correct ID3 tagging (non-negotiable). That's great, but no one is going to hear your contribution to the podcasting world until you put your files up on the web.

In Chapter 1, we cover the hosting provider selection process. In this chapter, we take an extensive look at the mechanics of the process, including how to appropriately name and organize your files.

Podcasters have a variety of options when it comes to uploading files. Although the methods are all different, they all help you accomplish the same job: copying files from your personal computer to their new home online. Many hosting providers have easy-to-use browser-based drag-and-drop file transfer utilities built into their service. In many cases, this may be all you need to get your files onto your server for others to consume. In this chapter, we dig a little deeper to ensure you not only know the “Ya’ Ba-Sic” way of doing things but that you understand other options to make it easier in cases where you need to maintain files for multiple shows or multiple hosting providers.

Show Art: Getting Graphic with Your Podcast

A big piece of successful podcasting is marketing, and a big part of marketing is branding. Your podcast logo (or show art) is very important to help set you apart. A large percentage of listeners use apps where show art is prominently displayed, both in directories and in playback modes. Apple once was indifferent about show art, but now it’s part of registering your podcast with its directory. So when getting ready to launch your podcast, you need to have a good look for your production like those featured in Figure 10-1.

Show artwork, commonly seen in many media players, is a nice option for podcasters who want to brand a podcast with a logo. Mur Lafferty’s Parsec-winning I Should Be Writing logo is a classic broadcast microphone with a sticky note slapped on it and a pencil, sharpened and ready for use. Then you have The Onion Radio News’s trademark onion with a globe ghosted behind it, the stamp of quality journalism at its funniest. These icons are associated with their shows, and this kind of branding is becoming more and more common in podcasting.

To get your artwork ready for prime time:

1. Design your show art to the following specifications:
   • Format: JPEG (.jpg) or PNG (.png) format
   • Color Mode: 8-bit channel, RGB mode
   • Resolution: 72 dpi

   • Size: 1400 × 1400 pixels (minimum)

     or 3000 × 3000 pixels (maximum)

2. Using File Transfer Protocol (FTP) application, upload your art somewhere on to your web server.

   If you are using a service like LibSyn, you will use its FTP options the same way you would upload an episode. If you are hosting the podcast on your own, you can use Cyberduck or Fetch to upload it somewhere on your server. For more details on uploading files to a server, take a look at the “Uploading your files” section, later in this chapter.

3. Pull up the artwork on your browser and then copy its URL.

   Once you have the URL of the show art copied, have it on a note somewhere on your computer. You will need that URL when registering your show with various directories.

4. When using your podcast plug-in with your blog, enter in your artwork's URL when asked for it, as seen in Figure 10-2.

   If you do a makeover of your show art, you can upload a new image to replace the old one.

5. Save your changes in the plug-in.

After you have all the details of your file covered, down to the branding behind your podcast, you have to get everything online so that others can enjoy what your creativity has to offer.

Adopting an Effective File Naming Convention

In Chapter 9, we talk about the importance of “the little things” such as ID3 tags. Equally important is how you decide to name your podcast media files. In this section, we illustrate the importance, not only to you as a podcaster, but also to your listening audience. Although no hard and fast rules for naming files exist, following some common conventions allows everyone to easily find your podcasts.

A good naming convention of a podcast accomplishes the following:

• Easy sequential ordering: Files should not appear at random in your directory. They should line up — first, second, third, and so on.
• “At a glance” recognition for your listeners: Calling a podcast media file my media file doesn't help very much. Calling it Bob's Fencing Podcast certainly does.

Here's an example of a well-named podcast media file, if we do say so ourselves:

Tech_Ep600_20200516.mp3

Although the structure may not be obvious, this filename adheres to both rules and even adds one more:

• Tech: This abbreviation stands for Technorama. Starting the filename with these four letters organizes the files together in the media folder. For listeners who can see only the filename on their MP3 players or computers, they can quickly recognize that files starting with these four letters belong to his show. Pretty much everyone listens to podcasts through some podcatching client these days, but don't discount that small segment that likes to download files to their hard drive and listen.
• Ep600: This is Episode 600 of the show. Referring to each show with a sequential number is a good idea, giving you and your fans a common reference point that is easier than “Remember when you did that one show with that one guy who said that funny thing? Man that was great!” Having the episode number right after the name also ensures that the files “stack up” right in the media folder, as well as in your listeners’ MP3 players. You may want to consider adding some leading zeroes to the number so episode 3 (003) comes before 600. Add more zeroes if you plan on doing more than 999 shows.
• 20200516: The date Chuck posted the file. The order he uses here is year-month-day. He uses 05 instead of 5 so that dates from October (10), November (11), and December (12) don't intermingle with January (which would happen if he used 1 instead of 01). True, in this case the files were already sorted by episode number, but you may choose to go with the date first.

Between each element, he adds an underscore (_) simply to provide a clear distinction of each part for his eye, or anyone else's eye looking at the filename.

Don’t use any spaces or special characters in your filenames. Stick with A–Z, 0–9, dashes, and underscores. Slashes (/, ), octothorpes (#), ampersands (&), and others can and do cause problems when creating RSS 2.0 files or when clients are handling the file. Also, leaving a space in the filename might mess up a URL, so if you want to space things out, use underscores or dashes (for example, use My_Podcast.mp3 instead of My Podcast.mp3).

The following examples are from well-respected podcasters who all follow the guidelines we set forth earlier:

• NMS-2017-04-01.mp3
• scienceontriplej20181006.mp3
• AC_EPISODE_021.mp3
• TSD-075.mp3

Note how each of them identifies the name of the podcast and provides a sequential way of ordering the files. If you leave out the episode number, as in the case of the Science on Triple J file, the year of the podcast ahead of month and day also ensures that 2018 files are always grouped together. If the podcaster had used the month first, as people traditionally think of dates in the United States, files would be mixed based on the month they were released, regardless of the year.

If thinking about the date that way seems a little too strange for you, do what Chuck does — stick a sequential episode number in front of your date, and don't worry about it.

Understanding How FTP Works

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the method by which you can transfer files from one destination to another over the Internet. You likely transfer files every day, from your desktop to your documents folder, from an email to your desktop, or even media files from a podcast’s server to your podcast app of choice.

Transferring your podcast files to and from the Internet isn't much different, at least on the surface and even at any depth necessary for podcasters to ply their trade. Lucky for you, specialty software exists to make this process even more simple. FTPing files has become as simple as dragging and dropping.

Some podcast hosting services, such as Liberated Syndication, or LibSyn (http://libsyn.com), mentioned earlier in the Show Art section, make this simple process even simpler by providing a web form to handle the uploading of podcast files, as described later in the “Uploading to a Podcast-Specific Host” section. Browser-based systems certainly remove the complexity for many, but it doesn't hurt to understand the processes outlined in this chapter. Many experienced podcasters need more flexibility than the limited functionality a browser-based upload process allows.

Regardless of what software, forms, or other assistance you use to move files around, the concept of FTP is the same.

FTP has been around for quite a while now. Archaic and seemingly nonintuitive names abound from the start, such as the following two computer systems involved:

• Local host: The local host is the computer you are sitting in front of and initiating the file transfer from. If you're using a laptop to connect to your web server, your laptop is the local host. If you're at work and logged in from a workstation, your office computer is the local host.

  The local directory or local path is the folder on your local host that contains the files you want to transfer. You can change local directories at will, but most FTP programs have a default starting place. Feel free to move around after that.

• Remote host: The remote host is the computer or web server to which you've connected. It's likely the spot where you're trying to get your MP3 files to go to allow others to download them.

  Not surprisingly, the remote host has its own remote directory (the folder on the remote system where you drop your files). Again, you can change or navigate through remote directories just as you can change the file folders on your computer.

Making Your Connection with an FTP Application

You need three pieces of information to initiate an FTP connection:

• The IP address or hostname of your remote host
• Login name
• Password

Your hosting company should have provided this information to you. If you don't have it handy, find it. You're not going any further without it.

All FTP programs do the same job but have slightly different methods of going about it. After you grasp the concept, using just about any FTP client is a simple process. Here are the general steps you follow to set up a connection in any FTP client:

1. Launch your FTP client and create a new connection.

   Because this step is what FTP clients are designed to do, they usually make this process very simple.

2. Enter the hostname of your web server, username, and password.

   This step identifies the remote system and shows you have access to the files and folders it contains.

3. Connect using either a button or a menu option.

   Depending on the speed of your connection, the connection is established in a matter of seconds.

The following sections show you how to use Cyberduck (http://cyberduck.io) and FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org). Both apps are free and available for Windows and Mac. You can find many FTP programs as freeware, shareware, and shrink-wrapped software, for every brand of up-to-date operating system. We picked these two for their ease of use and streamlined approach to getting the job done, but you can use the FTP program of your choice.

Step by step setup for FileZilla

FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org) operates much the same as Windows Explorer or the Mac Finder, allowing you to drag and drop files between your PC and your FTP server. When you've downloaded the FileZilla program, follow these steps:

1. On the Login toolbar (shown in Figure 10-4), enter your server name, username, and password.

   Leave the port blank. (It defaults to 21.)

2. Press the Quickconnect button.

   If you did things right, you see a lot of text scroll by in the upper-most window and content from your web server appears in the right windows, labeled Remote Site.

   Congratulations; you're now connected to your web server. If you entered something wrong, you get an error message in red text in the upper window. Correct your mistakes and try it again.

From here, you can navigate through the folders on your web server much as you do on your computer's hard drive. You can move up or down the file system, finding the spot where you want to drop your podcast files.

Uploading to a Podcast-Specific Host

Podcast-specific hosting companies significantly simplify the uploading process; many include web-based forms that take the place of additional computer programs to handle the uploading process. They also take care of archiving, RSS 2.0 creation, and even ID3 tagging.

Although this web-based uploading process is simple, we prefer the flexibility of using an FTP client — or better yet a command line interface. Or maybe we're old school… .

For the purposes of illustration, we use an account with LibSyn in this section. If you haven't already, you need to sign up with LibSyn and create your own account. Then follow these steps:

1. On LibSyn’s home page, enter your username and password and click the Login button.

2. Click the Content menu option and select Add New Episode.

   You are taken to the New Content page, as shown in Figure 10-5.

3. Click the Add Media File button.

4. Click Upload File From Hard Drive if your files are on your local hard drive. There are other options available if your file is on another server accessible via FTP or Dropbox.

   The File Upload dialog box opens.

   Note: HTTP upload is another name for form-based transfers.

5. Find the podcast media file you want to upload and either double-click the file or select it and click Open.

   If you’ve used proper ID3 tags on your podcast — and you have by this point, right? — you can check the box “Populate Form with ID3 Data” to save some time. Just be aware that the description may need some additional formatting as the importer doesn’t recognize paragraph breaks. Also check your title and description for “encoded” characters. You may need to do touch-ups like replace & with the & character.

6. If you did not choose to import the content of the ID3 tags, enter the information for your blog and/or podcast in the form.

   The blog settings are very simple: things like the name of your blog, your email address, and what category you want it placed in. Nothing here is mission critical, so fill it out however you want to see it listed. You can always come back and change it later.

7. When you finish, click the Publish button.

While LibSyn has full hosting capabilities, some may find the blogging feature a bit limited and use LibSyn as a file repository while hosting their blog on their own site, then referencing the files on LibSyn from their blog. To access files stored on LibSyn in your blog (and resulting RSS feed) follow the preceding steps to upload and publish the content. Then follow these steps after your file is published.

1. Go to the Content menu and select Previously Published.
2. Locate the file in the list and click the Link/Embed icon for that episode.
3. Copy the URL from the Direct Download URL field and use that as the location of your file in your blog software as needed.

LibSyn offers an FTP interface if you prefer to use an FTP client or command line interface. Your login and password are the same as through the web interface.

If you like to try it before you buy it, LibSyn offers up to a free month with the promo code podcast411 allowing you to get a feel for how it works before you fork over your hard-earned cash. Not that the very inexpensive monthly fees will break you or anything, but it’s nice to know how your future home might work.