Sorry we’ve been so quiet this week. Our minds and our time have been taken up with podcasting. Here’s something which might be useful to podcaters, but it’s a bit techie. It’s about getting Feedburner to produce a valid podcast feed.

Feedburner is a popular option for providing a syndicated feed. It lets you see how many subscribers you have, which is really interesting, - and by the way, our children’s podcast, Storynory, has picked up 225 subscribers since we launched it less than three weeks ago. And there’s another important reason to use Feedburner if you are a podcaster. It pepares your feed for the iTunes directory - and as our stats show that over 85% of our listeners use iTunes to subscribe to Storynory, that’s pretty important.

But when it comes to podcasts, it took us a few tries to get the feed to “validate” which means that the audio might not play in some music players. I’ve noticed that other podcaters say that they are having problems with Feedburner too. It’s a good idea to run your podcast feed through the feed validator. It should tell you if there’s anything wrong, and with any luck, give you some clues what to do about it .

One little trick I’ve picked up, is to avoid using any apostrophies or inverted commas in your posts that accompany the podcast publications. ” and ‘ don’t mix at all well with the iTunes tags that Feedburner inserts. Since we dropped correct punctuation, our Storynory podcast feed has validated perfectly. It’s a bit of a shame, as we are trying to encourage Children to be interested in literature, but we will just have to hope that mums and dads assume that we’ve adopted some trendy new style of punctuation.

The big “No, No ” which most podcasters are probably are aware of (but I wasn’t at first), is that you must only include one link to a rich media file such as an Mp3. Two is greedy, and podcast your feed won’t validate if you have more than one enclosure.