I'm hoping to start a podcast within the next couple months once things get settled down for me. I have two choices here: pay for a podcast hosting service, or do everything myself and upgrade my Linode plan (which I need to do at some point anyway). So far, I haven't found too many podcast RSS generators, and I don't trust myself writing the feed because I'm not familiar with XML and I tend to make a lot of typos, even for things I am familiar with.

I have seen some feed generators, but I was hoping to get some suggestions on what to use.

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Kris the Piki Geeker

Why would this require an upgraded linode? For more disk space? Podcasts don't use much space; 16GB of space on a cheap linode would provide somewhere between 291 and 1165 hours of podcasts, depending on bitrate.

The nice thing about a podcast is that it's just a pile of static content; hosting one isn't too laborious.

I'd probably try django-podcast first, and work from there. It uses its own XML templates instead of building atop the standard feed generator. It also uses the standard FileField for enclosures, so if hosting it does stress your bandwidth, using S3 or some other object storage provider should be a minor config change with django-storages.

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I'm not concerned about storage, it's bandwidth. I am going to have two sites on the Linode (one of which is the podcast site), the podcast audio, and I plan to setup a private Minecraft server to play with a couple friends.

EDIT: I'll be uploading four copies of the audio too. Not for redundancy, just to support both MP3 and Ogg Vorbis, and to have a high-bandwidth version and low-bandwidth. I just like to cover all sides when possible, and I know there will be listeners who will be redundant in downloading all four copies.



Certainly worth checking out.

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Kris the Piki Geeker

If the podcasts will be under an appropriate license, you can upload them to archive.org. They will even handle converting from FLAC to Ogg Vorbis and MP3 for you. I have no idea about setting up a feed to point there, though.

Converting them then uploading to my Linode is fairly easy, especially if I write a script (I could probably do a script to generate the feed if I knew how to do XML ). Plus I don't want two separate servers for the same thng, I try to keep things simple and easy to manage, and I tend to be cautious with what I do with my stuff

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Kris the Piki Geeker

Even if you don't go the Django route, check out the templates in django-podcast for their XMLy goodness. Templates are not the "best" way to generate XML, of course, but they're much easier to learn from (and probably more efficient) than code that uses an XML-generation library.

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