 Podcasters round table round 88. We got our co-host back and we're gonna get technical in honor of Daniel coming back. He's sort of the technical guy, I think he's the most technical guy on this round, but yeah, what's inside your podcast RSS feed? So a little geeky, but you know, it's the round table we can go anywhere. We want, we have a new round table and if you want to be that new round table someday, make sure you go to podcastersroundtable.com slash guest sign up, let us know what you wanna talk about. You'll get a form that'll ask you, I'll pull you on maybe in a couple of years, but we'll try to get you as fast as possible. Daniel, welcome back to the round table. He's at a round table. I am, I'm live from Cincinnati. It's Thursday night. I am at actually a Greater Cincinnati podcasters meetup group right now. So you'll hear some background noises. Podcasters are talking and having fun talking with each other, but it is really fun to be back on the round table talking with you guys. And now that I've got a baby, I wanted to have the baby to show you tonight, but it just didn't work out. Yeah, you're gonna have to start wearing him. And then, you know, you can put a little headset, mini headset microphone. You're gonna have to get one of those. Send all podcasting related baby toys to P.O. Box 739, Burlington, Kentucky 41005. Address that to the audacity to podcast. And I will take photos of my baby playing with anything podcasting related. We're wearing foam earmuffs that look like a headset. That's what I'm going for. I'm gonna make that market. Dave, welcome back to the round table. Yeah, man, we got the band back together. It's awesome, dude. Yeah, I'm Dave Jackson from the School of Podcasting.com. And just to stick with the baby team, I'm wearing diapers right now. Oh, always a good way to go because this could go for like 10 hours. You never know, you know? So I've got something to drink and, you know, little depends, we're good to go. Fantastic. All right, new round tableer, Glenn, welcome. Thanks, thanks for having me. I'm really super honored to be here with the three amigos. You know, it's only in the podcasting space can you have three potential competitors get together and share the information. So I'm super honored to be here. Been a long time fan of the show and talk to all you guys about feeds before, I guess. Yeah, so we brought you on specifically. I don't, Glenn, I don't technically, I don't think you have a podcast or do you? I had a podcast right in the beginning and immediately as a software guy, I realized, man, there are tons and tons of problems with this. And I went off to try to solve some of those problems. And I actually maintained the podcasting plugin for a while for WordPress. And obviously I do the cast feed validator now as part of that. And I also do mobile apps that consume feeds. So I'm on both sides of the feeds, generating feeds, reading feeds. So I needed something to verify those feeds to make sure who's at fault. Is it the reader, the writer, somewhere in between? I suspect I know which way that falls most of the time, but we won't be to blame here. Well, that's exactly why we brought you on. You are, your head is buried deep into RSS feeds. So what a perfect person to join us for this first round table. I'm pretty sure it's your first round table to talk about RSS feeds. All right, cool. So we don't know how much time what Daniel has. He's gonna try to hang out as long as he can. So let's dig right into it. And now I was thinking on this round that what we wanna do is sort of go, there's stuff in your feed, right? You'll see a tag, whether it says iTunes owner, whether it just says title. And there's all these different tags. That's if you've ever even looked at your RSS feed. Now, if you've created one, it might be sort of WYSIWYG style. I mean, if you're on Libs and you're really filling some boxes, you might not have to actually see those items or that code in your feed. So if you've ever looked at it, then maybe you've seen this stuff and you're wondering, how did I get that in there? Or do I need that? What could come out? What else would we rather have in there? Whatever. So let's try to interpret that for the average podcaster here tonight. So it's a little less discussion, but I think there are still things to discuss. We will go down that road as well. But I thought we'd look at the podcasters round table feed, which does get generated via Libson. And we'll look at those feeds are different across different platforms, depending on how you make them. But in general, they have a lot of the same stuff. So we'll use that as just a sample. I don't know if you guys have that pulled up, but we will take a look. It's actually, if you go to castfeedvalidator.com, it's .com, right, Glenn? Yes. First of all, this is a really cool RSS feed validator. So you can get your feed validated. It looks really nice at format, so you can see everything. And you'll look at the bottom. There's a test feed, and it's been podcasters round table for a really long time. So thanks to Glenn for putting that on there. And yeah, I have to make sure it's working because it's right there to be tested all the time. And I kind of forget about that. And I made a big change, and I forgot to tell Glenn. I was like, hey, I changed how I'm doing my feed, but. It actually looks better now that you switched over to Libson. Oh, there you go. So we could get into some hot debate already, but we'll try to avoid that. All right, yeah, let's just get, let's be technical, less debate. We can dive on that in the end. But starting, you know, I guess I have question for you guys. And even Glenn went back in the day, back in the day, how do you create your RSS feed? Podcasters round table, I said is done via Libson. It used to be done via WordPress. And you're probably not gonna get much variation on this panel, but Daniel, how are you creating your, let's go with the audacity of podcasts. How are you creating that RSS feed? I create the feed with PowerPress and that's PowerPress seven point, whatever the latest update is. And I'm pretty sure it will always be PowerPress because I like creating it from the same site where I manage all of the other content. And I like all of the features that PowerPress provides. I know the Libson feed is extremely versatile and certainly stable. It's versatile in that you can manually add whatever RSS tags you want to. So if there's a new standard or new thing you want to implement, you can put that in there. And I think Libson is the only other service that lets you do something like that. But I like running it all through PowerPress for all of my podcasts I like that. Now don't you still implement something with FeedBurner? I use FeedBurner in the only state I now recommend as long as you have a good RSS creation at the source and that would be PowerPress or Libson. The only way I recommend using FeedBurner in that case is in a vanilla raw state. So FeedBurners features are all turned off. And the only reason why I'm still using FeedBurner is simply an extra collet paranoia or whatever just that it means that my feed can stay online when if my website crashes or if I have a caching issue or if there's any kind of problem like that the feed is hosted elsewhere but SmartCast is what causes most of the problems on FeedBurner. Stats on FeedBurner turn off. I have SmartCast turned off everything you can turn on in FeedBurner, I have turned off and that's pretty much the only way I'd recommend it but I'm still using my own domain even though it runs through FeedBurner, you look at it and it's my feeds.noodle.mx. Yeah, the average podcast I would say don't do that. Like unless Daniel's helping you or you're really geeky probably go with something easier. But Dave, we could get Dave in trouble here. Dave, how do you create your RSS feed? Mr. I work at Lipson though. Oh, I use both. I mean, I have some feeds on PowerPress. I have many of my feeds on Lipson. And if we go way, when I originally got into podcasting I was using a piece of software called FeedForAll. Mm, yeah, I tried that. Yeah, that was icky. We probably all hand coded a feed at some point in our career. Yeah, so it's one thing we should point out RSS feeds are not meant to be like we're looking at it but like the average person when they see an RSS feed button and they click on it and they get a bunch of gibberish they're like it's broken. It's like it's really meant most of the time the RSS feed goes into an app or some sort of feed reader it's not really meant 99.9% of the time unless you're having a problem for humans to look at. Now I have a tip here on this. Many people say look at your RSS feed in Firefox because Firefox will make it look prettier. So it's easier to understand what's going on or find a thing. If you're using Chrome, install the extension xvxml viewer and that will make your RSS feeds look pretty inside of Chrome. I mean, pretty in the sense of you can expand and collapse certain sections and it's easier to browse and see what's going on with your feed. So you're not just looking at black text on a white background it formats it nicely. That's xvxml viewer. Yeah, and this is actually something I was gonna bring up because I was gonna say, how do you even see your feeds? Because if you take your feed address in this case podcastersroundtable.libson.com.rss and you look at that in Firefox you're gonna see it's gonna be pretty. I mean, it's gonna be formatted so it's more readable, right? It's gonna be, I forget what I'm looking for here but in a lot of cases I don't wanna see it that way. I want to see the tags, I wanna see the code. So if I pop over to Chrome in its original state I get to see all the code. And in this case that's what I'm looking at for this round because it lets me see those tags. So there's a couple of different ways to view it. I mean, if you went to castfeedvalidator.com you know, Glenn's got it very stylized and it's beautiful and that's kind of mostly where you'd probably wanna see your feed but if you ever wanna see that code you might have to use a different browser. Now Glenn, I'm assuming there's no way to switch it so you can actually see the raw, right? It's all- Not here, yeah you can just do that in your browser. Right, in Firefox you can right-click and choose view source and it'll give you the raw. Right, good tip. All right, so looking at that and that's out actually was the next place I was gonna go to so I think we're good there. Check it in different browsers. That's kind of take your RSS feed URL, put it in different browsers you'll see what we're talking about. Let's go right over to the round table feed as the un-stylized version and there's a bunch of junk up top and it's XML version and coding. This is the stuff I think, I think Daniel I had yours pulled up too and I think yours is a little different stuff up there but in general this isn't even something we affect, right? This is kind of like some standards, right? Do we know about that? That all this XML, RSS version, all that stuff? Yeah, so we're gonna be throwing all kinds of letters out at you guys. RSS is a set standard of XML language. XML is kind of like HTML stands for extensible markup language, something like that but what it basically means is that an XML document can be any kind of tag with data inside of it. RSS is a particular standard of a collection of tags. So that stuff that's at the top of your RSS feed is basically saying this is a standard RSS feed it follows these protocols. It also follows these what are called namespaces which add additional definitions of standardized tags like iTunes all of those iTunes colon whatever tags are coming from the iTunes RSS namespace which defines what those tags do. So you can have all kinds of namespaces and we'll talk more about a new namespace that's in development later but this is all defining to say, okay here's something that you may have never seen before it's maybe it's like iTunes colon gibberish. What does that mean? Well that goes back to the namespace which defines it as a certain thing and that kind of stuff is near the top of the feed defining where the definitions are. Yeah I'm seeing like even yahoo and w3.org I mean stuff I've never even bothered to research but it's up there but I think this is pretty standard and again it's not something you really have an effect on this is something that is kind of put in there at least in our case with Libs and I don't change that it's just showing you some stuff up there that you don't affect. You want me to get real geeky here? Yep. You know these things are specified there's another file called a DTD which specifies how these things are actually formatted and can be verified and one of the challenges about verifying these feeds is that Apple did either never made one or got rid of it somehow there is no DTD for their namespace which is the iTunes namespace which makes it incredibly difficult to verify. So how do you get around what do you do? Pardon me? So how do you have to do it manually empirically you know I just have to say oh they have a spec a written spec so I can go there and say okay these fields this field should be no more than 128 characters of this file you know this should not be longer than 5K or something like that but it's all just written down. So you're defining that in your when you code sort of cast feed validator that's something that's called an empirical method so I have to go and change it every time they change the spec which is one of the reasons a lot of the other if you go to just a regular RSS reader it's gonna have trouble with podcasting because they haven't kept up with the new specifications and the new namespaces that have come along so that's one of the reasons I built this thing is because for instance the blueberry made their own namespace and it would fail you know since blueberries making so many feeds it was failing half the podcasting feeds because of the namespace. Where was it failing? It was failing on the namespace the blueberry namespace because they never added that in. You're saying the standard RSS feed validator like feedvalidator.org. The ones that are not aware of you know of these podcasting namespaces and you know without TDDs there's no automatic way to get this updated. There you go. Now you know why Glenn is, he's the expert man that's why he's here. So awesome stuff. Definitely something I didn't know. Oh that's not too geeky. I mean we make no assumptions here like there are people who understand it and people who don't and we just let everyone just catch up or ignore it at their will. You know someone is going to listen to this episode and they're gonna be like wow best round table episode ever. I just totally loved it. And many are gonna say worst, worst ever. Most of the people are already gone now. Don't do that to my brain again. Just wait for you guys to talk about TDDs man. For years. I was tested so I have no TDDs in my feed. All right, hey so okay. Getting past the junk that we don't even affect. Right at the top the first thing I'm seeing around table feed is it's work would deal with these carrots, right? So if you go in there you see the left carrot, right carrot, greater than less than symbols. And between you'll see the first one says channel. What? Your channel is your show. Channel is your show. Just like you have a podcast name and an episode name things in your channel affect your show. And then later other things have stuff for your episodes. That's why this sits at the very top. That would make sense. Seems like it. Seems like the show is a less, the episodes are a lesser included of your channel so. Right. Yeah so we may talk about things that are show level which technically it's called channel level but show level, channel level, channel level. Those are basically the same things and then there's the item level or episode level which is that episode specific information and that's just a little bit deeper in. But so when you hear people say you have to change this at the show level that's your overall show at the channel level or at the episode level those are those, I'm sorry at the item or episode level. Those are the individual items in the feed. Hey I wanna play a little, who wants to be a millionaire or whatever show that was since we have Daniel and we have a studio audience of sorts not really. You can do this in the chat as well or you can email Ray at thepodcastersstudio.com. I meant Ray at podcastersroundtable.com. Both of those work. Daniel can you pull the microphone away a little bit and just yell to the crowd. Ask if anybody hand codes their feed. I wanna see if anyone raises their hand. Hey Cincinnati podcasters. Does anyone hand code their RSS feed? They say what? Do what? Did he sneeze? I would say no. They're like, looks of horror on their faces they say no. As they should. Smart group in Cincinnati. All right, thumbs up for them. You can just tell them thumbs up. All right, so we got the channel in mind that we're seeing, well here's the thing and my channel is really just code here. It's, now I'm getting a link for my RSS feed. It's an Adam link. Do we even, what the heck's an Adam link? It's a different, Glenn, what's Adam versus RSS? Is it another specification? Very, very similar to RSS. And they're just overlapping namespaces. One of the things that makes this, we're seeing right away that this stuff is very confusing, right? And one of the reasons why it's so confusing is podcasting has no technology of its own. This is all stolen technology. Stolen, I love it. Hacks is like our pirates. Our pirates. It's close enough, so we can, so that's why you see channel instead of show. This is actually just for, in the early days of blogging, they use this to distribute blogs, individuals. If you've seen that in millions of blogs, the RSS feed, and you have a RSS reader where you read your blogs. So this is the technology used for that. And podcasters came along and said, hey, this is close enough, they'll use it. So that's why you get all these names and stuff that actually don't fit for podcasting. The only podcasting stuff that you'll see in there, and it's very specific to Apple are the iTunes tags. You'll see the few iTunes tags. In that namespace, that was specifically added by Apple to add some of the stuff that they needed. But it basically is just kind of sandwiched in. You'll see that it's just sandwiched right in to the standard RSS feed. And the Atom, again, is a similar technology that was built around the same time. This is all pretty old stuff. Very soon, we won't need feeds, and I'm not sure what's gonna happen when that comes about. Controversy alert, we need like a bell or some type of siren. We'll go there. Can I go a little history? Yeah. Talk a little history here. The reason we have a feed is because we had offline devices, right, that we had to get. An iPod. Get the files to the iPod. So we had to have this way to kind of transmit that anymore, but basically now we have all online devices. So now we can stream this stuff, so we definitely don't need this feed anymore. I actually disagree with that, because how would you communicate that something is available if it's not through some form of a feed? Now, I do believe someday, and this could be decades from now, but someday RSS may be replaced by something else, like maybe JSON, or which is JSO in. It's a different kind of data feed system. Yeah. Well, I don't think it will disappear. I think a new technology will come along and just go side by side. It'll be a lot faster. I'd be an API. So whatever the transfer over that API is, probably JSON won't really matter. There is a big debate about this, right? Why not big? But I'm on the geeks in the podcasting space as the NPR public radio people are entering podcasting. They want certain features that aren't necessarily available in RSS. So they're talking about, oh, we need to switch to an API, which is a special programming interface. Yeah, that's where the pressure's coming from at that top 10% where they do an ad injection, that kind of thing. But so much of that you can already do with RSS. They just, they don't realize that you can extend RSS. That's the nature of XML, which RSS is built on, is it's extensible. So we don't really need RSS 3.0. We don't really need an API. APIs would be helpful for other kinds of things. Yeah, like ad injection, but that's a media service API, media hosting API, not the feed API. Well, it would be really good for a whole lot of reasons, but one of the things that I actually, the reason it's called Cast Feed Validator rather than Podcast Feed Validator, is because I started to, you know, to spack out a new feed probably, I don't know how many years ago now. It is very difficult to move. You know, just like Blueberry had trouble getting their extensions in just because the acceptance it's a big mountain to move now to get extensions put in. About the only people that can put extensions in is iTunes. I mean, Google has a whole set of their own, but they basically, from what I can tell, they're not really being used because they just mirror the iTunes one. So iTunes kind of controls. Who's the gatekeeper of this? Well, who's this person saying you can't put stuff in there? iTunes. There isn't. Well, it's open source, right? RSS. Yeah, you could do it. I mean, you're familiar with Tim Pritlove. He does the love pod love plugin. He's got extensions to the feed, but haven't been widely accepted. He's had them for a very long time. He was doing the chat, putting the chapter stuff into the feed instead of into the, there's been a lot of people who've tried to do, you know, remember the chapter stuff that was in the actual files originally? It makes a little bit more sense to put that into the feed and there's been many attempts to put stuff into the feed. Who has to accept it then? You say, but it's not widely accepted by anyone. Well, just the community has to accept it. They have to, you know, there has to be players that can recognize the new ones and do something with them. You could put them in there, just like the, you know, the blueberry stuff was just put in there for a while and nobody really used it. Right. One of those, they did chapter markers or something too, right? Blueberry? I'm trying to remember what they're said. Did one of the things that they did early was to just, you know, indicate what order you're supposed to list of the podcast in, right? So oldest to newest, newest to oldest. And then Apple finally put that, added that to the, to there. I can't remember what's one of the, some of the other things that they've done. They've done a bunch. Yeah. Where we are is it's called iTunes order or the meta marks is the thing you're referring to earlier. Yeah. That was, that's, you know, meet them or however, Dan, it's fun. That's all I had to say, meta marks. It's fun. The way RSS works, open standard. Yeah. You can put anything in, but like if you put in Thaddeus as a tag in your RSS feed, iTunes won't know what to do with it. It'll just ignore it. And that's the way most apps, if an app is designed well enough, it'll just ignore that. And most of the apps will. Well, that's the nature of RSS is you're free to ignore what you don't understand. So it really takes these bigger players in the space to say, hey, we are going to support this new thing or we're going to adopt this in order to get mass adoption. But you're welcome to add to a standard extended, but will anyone support it? That's the thing. Yeah. That's the problem right there. So let me just say behind the scenes when Dave and I were sitting here waiting to get everyone on the round, Dave says, so how are we going to get an hour out of this? And I just wanted to let you know, we're not past channel, which is not even a tag we use. That's why you brought me into this. So never a problem. Fear not, Dave. Yeah. We're good. So let's get past channel because channel's not even something you affect. It's really kind of just seems like it's defining the top. The first thing you can actually affect that I'm seeing right below that is title. And this is something that you can actually change or is based on information that you put in your feed. Holy cow. We can do something with this. Well, this is where it gets confusing because there are titles later in the feed that are the title for your episode. Right. So we're still, so we're right under channel, right? So we're dealing with show. Right. This is your show title. Right. And so let's, let's go with lips and how Dave, there's a section in lips and where you just fill in boxes that basically it's going to ask you, does it say title or how does that? See, here's the other thing, like power press, Daniel knows it very well, may tell it may actually call this one thing, like description, it's not, but, and then like you have iTunes summaries, all these weird things. We got a lot of words sometimes for the same thing. So in this case, title, how is that represented in? So when you're looking in power press, I call this sort of a whizzy wig, right? Cause you're just filling in a box for these things. You're not going in and really changing any code by looking at code. So in lips and Dave, how is that? Is it just a title? Yeah. You go under settings and then edit show settings and it says show title. Gotcha. Show title. Right. And if you're going to look for show title in your raw RSS feed, you're not going to see it. Let's say that you're going to see your channel and then they've got these other carrots with title. So this year, I mean, I've got podcasters round table and then I've got dash teaching and learning podcaster discussion. That's my subtitle. Now I'm doing this because this is, title is going to be taken for your show in iTunes. iTunes is going to pull. So here's another thing. Not everyone pulls the same information from the same spots. This stuff is crazy, right? So you put this in your feed to, to, to give directories, information, iTunes, overcast, itcher, all these places, but not all of them pull from the feed. And sometimes we wonder, well, is this pulling from the ID three tag inside your MP3 file? We can get into that. Or is it pulling it from the feed? We don't always know. So that's why in a lot of times it's best to have this stuff filled out even if you don't know any place that's using it. I think ID three tags is probably a good example of that. It's like, do we need ID three tags anymore? Well, if someone doesn't pull something from the feed, they're going to, they might be getting it from your metadata, your ID three information that lives inside your MP3. Dave? Yeah, that's half the fun of it because the podcast app from Apple does not look at ID three tags. And it only pulls the- Like it did it one time. Like you just can't tell ever. Yeah, overcast does. If you usually ID three tags come into play if you are downloading the media from a website on it like your desktop would be an example. And you open it up in something like Windows Media Player then ID three tags will come into play. And iTunes, even desktop iTunes does also use the ID three tags for some information. See, and this will all change next year. So don't burn any of that in your brain, you guys. What do you take away from the round table? Fill it all out, do it all. Put your ID three tags in, fill all your information for your feed. Assume if there's a box to put something in it, you should put something in it. Even though on lips in this as keywords in this debatable whether you know those aren't supposedly using iTunes but somewhere else maybe they are. Just fill it in. So the title is very important when it comes to iTunes. And Daniel knows so much about this and SEO. I have a subtitle there because I want it to pick up a few of these words for optimization such as learning and podcasting. Let's call that a tagline because subtitle is a separate- Okay, see? Yes, man, I hope, there's like three people left listening to this. That's not true. But they are loving us. The people who care about this stuff, this is the type of show they listen to, man. So we're good. Thanks for staying with us, all three of you. So Daniel wants to call it, what do you want to call it? A tagline, yes, a tagline. What you're adding, yeah, to podcasters round table hyphen, you say something else and it's still the same title field but you're giving yourself a tagline in your title field. Right, and now underneath that title, I have pub date. Now, what is now, that's publication date, January 31st. What is that? That changes, obviously. That's when your feed was updated. So this is something- So when I put something new in the feed, it's when I updated it? Yeah, I believe that's how it's generally used. Some systems may, content management systems generating the RSS feed may generate a new feed every day. Maybe they change that pub date. So I can't really say every system does it the same way. And right underneath that, it says last build date. So Glenn, what's the difference there? Do you use this information, this pub date and last build date? Last build date is pretty not very common thing. It's just another way to remember that there's tons of people out here reading these feeds, right? And they need to know if there's anything, any important changes. So usually it's the pub date, but if the pub date is not, if you're doing something funny with your pub date, in other words, you're updating, you're updating it for some other reason, but you really haven't rebuilt the feed, then you can use the last built date. Gotcha. That's a very, not very common field. The lips, that's a kind of, I mean, it's a standard thing, but not too many people fill it out. Cool, yeah, these aren't even two things that we don't have a lot of, I don't fill that out on lips and that something gets automatically generated appears. Yeah, those are both done by the software that's built in the feed at the time. So, I mean, some of them build a new feed every time you request it, but that's a bad idea because that means that the reader has to go and look at the data every single time. I mean, Apple is trying to, read these things as few times as they can because you're bandwidth, you were mentioning that you had bandwidth issues with this feed, that's one of the reasons you moved it, the motivation was because it's being read too many times. And these dates are how, the file data is also another date, but these dates are how software knows whether there's any new content in it to go look at. So that's a good question. So you're saying, let's go with iTunes, for example, iTunes loads my feed when they see it's been updated. They load the newest thing based on pub date when we get to episodes or they load the whole thing. You have to load the whole, fortunately with XML, you have to load the whole thing to parse it out. Okay, and then is that a pull on my server? That's a pull on your server, yeah. Right, so I mean, I'm seeing, we're all, I feel like episode 100 is the new high school diploma, like there's just where if you're a podcaster, if you've hit a certain level, in minimum levels like episode 100, you'll get there. But, every time this feed is being pulled, then that's hitting your CPU. If you're hosting your feed on your website, again, we'll try to stay away from the debate. The rain is going crazy outside. If it sounds like I have a bunch of hiss or something, that's what's going on. And so yeah, it was taking a toll on my CPU, which we know shared hosting is the limit there. It's not, people think it's unlimited, whatever. Okay, so let's just go past that because I wanted to dive down that ugly. Oh my gosh, it's raining so hard. Do you guys hear that? Like it's sounding like, yeah, it's crazy. Okay. Dave, why don't you take over? The link underneath that, under the generator, on my door open, that's why it's so bad. I have a link and that's to the podcast round table website. So that's something else we have control over, right? Yeah. So you'd want to point that at whatever your website is. And then generators just simply, what is making that feed? So that's helpful for tech support people who go in, they look at your feed and you're like, oh, I can see you're using PowerPress, but it's version like 4.2 from the 50s. You need to update that. It's from the 50s. I remember that, man, those were the good old days. You'd get a PowerPress feed and like a soda pop. It was amazing. For a nickel. It was awesome. And then language is just, what language is the default language of, I guess the blog copyright? Some of these are somewhat self-explanatory. So, and this is where nobody knows what to put in that. So is it, do I put my name? Do I put my company name? Daniel, do you have any take on that? Do I usually just put my name in the year or my company name in the year? By American copyright laws, just putting something out there, it's instantly copyrighted. So you don't have to say it's copyrighted, but it's a good idea to say it is copyrighted or who is claiming ownership of the copyright of that material. So what's good to do is put the little copyright symbol in there. If you don't know how to type it on your computer, just Google copyright symbol, copy and paste it into there. Put the year, the latest year of your latest episode or you could put in a range of years, like for the Audacity to podcast, it would be 2010 to 2017, and then whoever is claiming the copyright if it's your company or you put that in there. And that just helps to say, hey, I'm the one claiming copyright of this. I'm the one you should contact. And it looks a little scarier and more official. Don't mess with my stuff. It's like officially copyrighted in there. Yes, I love the little symbol. It looks like you paid for it. Down with that. Emoji copyright. After that, Docs is a link to my website. What is that, Glenn? What is Docs? Now that's just a chance for you to put some more. You could link it someplace else to- Who's using that? Like where is that coming from? Cause like Dave mentioned, most people aren't seeing it. I haven't seen a box where you can fill in. Yeah, but I mean, what, so, okay. So for example, iTunes, when on your iTunes page, you actually have a link to your website. And that's coming, I'm assuming from link for your show link, right? I don't know what this Docs is, but we don't have a chance to actually affect that. I'm the most part, so I wouldn't worry about it. I was just curious what Docs is. I got managing editor. Apparently I have a new title. I'm the managing editor of Podcasts Around Table. I didn't know this. I did not know this. What is that? I would assume that is the email that when they want to feature you on the front page of iTunes, that is the email that it's going to. This probably is important for Google, in Google, right? Because if you submit, don't you, you have to have your email or they send it to someone and you can't confirm it to get your feed into Google Play Store or something like that, right? Right. Yeah, they, I think they send you an email to confirm that way they know that you're you. And probably the same goes, even the same goes with supported iTunes. If you don't have the right feed and in fact you don't contact them from that email address that's in your feed address, they're going to ask you to do that, I believe. Yeah, your email address is in two places. The managing editor, I don't know what apps actually use that, but the other one is iTunes owner, which is a little bit farther down, at least when we're looking at the round table feed. That's what I thought it was. So I'm getting iTunes. Yeah, iTunes owner contains both a name as one tag and an email address is another tag. And that's the email address iTunes uses to contact you for anything related to your feed. And that's the email address that if you're not careful and you're using SoundCloud, by default SoundCloud puts their email address in there, not yours. Now you can't change that inside of your SoundCloud settings if you are using SoundCloud. I am so sorry. I am so sorry. Yeah, probably not a good idea. But again, if you are, there's RSS there too. But you can see that one of the, this is where you might start to see differences between using one host over another. But yeah, right from there, now we start to hit some iTunes specific stuff. Now, back in the day, Dave, we needed Feedburner. We talked a little about Feedburner, Daniel, which we don't, you don't use any of the pieces anymore, but who wants to tell us why we used Feedburner in the first place? Well, back in the day, you know, it was, there wasn't any of this. They're like, Apple's like, hey, we're bringing an iTunes. Great, all you need to do is add this code. And we all went, I'm using WordPress. And we don't have anything at that point to put this code in there. And WordPress makes the feed on the fly kind of thing. So we're all kind of like, what are we gonna do? Enter Feedburner. Hey, just put your feed over here and we'll put in the extra tags. And we're like, yay, it was like Christmas and whatever. Why do you think Google did that for us? Well, actually at the time, let's back that up. It wasn't owned by Google yet. It was owned by Feedburner. So, yeah, shame on me. I'm getting my history mixed up here. But yeah, Feedburner came along. We're like, oh, this is the best thing ever. And so we just threw in your feed and you could upload your artwork and it could track your subscribers. And it was heaven. It was awesome. Fast forward to 2017 and people are going, this is really weird. My description for my show is being used on every single one of my episodes. Feedburner. People are calling in going, I've uploaded- Smartcast, Feedburner Smartcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, yeah, that's a good point. And, or it just flat out, my last three episodes aren't showing in iTunes. And you go, well, that's really weird. And you go over and you look and you can see where they're, in this case, if they're using Libsyn, their episodes are live, but you go look at their feed and it just stopped. It just, for whatever reason. So they have to go into Feedburner, click on troubleshoot eyes and click on the giant re-sync button. And Feedburner goes over, looks at your feed and brings the new information over, which then updates iTunes. So those are the two biggies that I know of, at least, that Feedburner causes. And Feedburner Smartcast, let me ask. If Glenn's prediction is true, if we do migrate away from RSS, you can see how Feedburner still is, it's like there, some of it's broken, but it's just dying slow. People still use it. People still hear it recommended. Like, if we do make a change, you can see how slow that that's gonna be. I mean, it's just gonna be, there'll be a bunch of issues in that change as well. Here's my theory on Feedburner. Rather than kill it, they're gonna make it like the spouse that is like the worst spouse ever, so that everybody just leaves it. Well, Feedburner or Google is slowly... They want you to break up with them is what you're saying. That's it, yeah. Because they don't want to be the bad guy. Feedburner is basically on life support right now. They're keeping it alive. Do you remember actually a couple of years ago, I did an episode about this, even to say, hey, the new Feedburner is coming. Do you remember that? Google had this whole new design for Feedburner. It looked like Google Analytics. It looked great. I mean, it was terrible in terms of, I would turn it on and be like, I can't see half of what I'd need to see, like it was. But that just disappeared. I don't know why, but I think it was in 2015, Google did update Feedburner. They gave it a little shot in the arm, if you consider that a good thing, and increased the feed size limit from half a megabyte to a full megabyte. And that's just the kind of keeping it alive sort of thing. They didn't really make any other updates other than that. But that tells me that they just want to keep it around, but that's just a simple switch that they changed. Cool, so working our way down the line here. Next thing, so we hit the iTunes stuff, I guess the first thing, after that managing editor thing, I guess iTunes summary. So what the heck is iTunes summary? That's your description. Oh yeah, funny, why don't they call it, why isn't it called description? iTunes description, yeah. Well, there is a separate description tag for RSS, and that's a standard RSS tag description field. iTunes and many other podcast apps will follow this hierarchy, like let's take Google Play Music, for example. If you submit your podcast to Google Play Music, you can submit it if it's an iTunes compliant feed, and Google Play Music will interpret it correctly. But Google does have their own namespace, so there are now Google Play tags, very similar. Most of them are identical to iTunes tags. There are a couple that are slightly different. But what Google will do is it will first look and see, is there in a Google Play tag? If so, use the data that's in that. If there isn't a Google Play tag, then look at the iTunes tag. If the iTunes tag isn't there, then look at a equivalent if such exists tag. And the iTunes summary is one of those things. So it's your overall description of your show, but if the iTunes summary tag isn't there, then iTunes will fall back to using the description tag. But you can do better things with the iTunes summary tag, like you see a C data in there that's wrapped around the text that's in there. That's basically a way to say in an RSS feed, the information that's inside of this particular tag has extra formatting to it. Currently, we can't do any kind of formatting for your show level description. Like you can't bold italicize hyperlink text. When you can, iTunes just strips it out. I think someday iTunes and the podcast app will allow you to have formatting in your feed in that show level description, but right now they only support it on the episode level. So wait, you're saying the C data is there for what? To tell feed readers that the information inside of this is encoded in a way that has some formatting with it. So it has the ability, but they don't use it. So I mean. Right. But if they didn't wrap it with C data and you had like HTML tags in there for your hyperlinks or bold or that kind of thing, then it would throw an error. So the CDAT is there necessary and then iTunes just strips that out. It's kind of like a safety net for anybody reading an RSS. You see that C data, you say, okay, in that C data section, I'm just going to take whatever's there. I'm not going to try to parse through it. Right. So any kind of, you know, that's where you get tripped up with HTML. Now you can see that this looks like HTML, this XML file. So you would start getting parsing errors. And so you want to, anytime you run into just, this is just a chunk of data, not going to look at it. I'm just going to grab it. That's what C data is for. And if it, would it, would the feed break or it just would display weird if this was being done wrong? If there was no C data and then you had it formatted and you were saying it wouldn't parse it, would our feed break? Well, here's a, here's an interesting thing about breaking feeds. Right. Sounds like a new show coming to you AMC. AMC, there you go. I'm the one who knocks. You know, Apple has built a super engine for consuming the worst formatted feed in the world. Right. So what you're saying is that it can handle a lot of mistakes. Is that what you're saying? It can handle a lot of crap sent to it. However, if say you have a new podcast player that's that you want to promote to or whatever it's going to be years before it has that kind of, you know, armor around it to consume these things. So it's, you know, it's, it's kind of important. You know, I tell a lot of people, you know, it's what part of what the cash feed validators for us. If you make a good feed, then any app or any directory, that's another important thing. There's lots of directories popping up can read your feed and consume it and get it out there. And they're not going to go ahead and contact the managing editor say, Hey, there's something wrong with your feed. That's just like it doesn't parse. Boom. So that's what I posted. More shows. So that's a throwback to the previous episode. You're welcome. Troy. Yeah. So, okay. That's all kinds of questions. How is, you said armor built up around it. So iTunes has stuff beyond behind the scenes that, that fixes errors that we're saying. Well, for example, if they, if I run into a summary, I treat it like C data pretty much, even if there's no C data there. So I'll just consume whatever's there. For example, the podcasters round table on your old feed, the very first thing you had is an iFrame in your summaries, which was the video, right? So, and that's kind of the biggest cardinal sin for a feed is to put an iFrame. And that's really coming from, so I used to build it on WordPress. Yeah. That's why your feed cleaned up when you moved over to Libsyn is WordPress allows through a lot of crap in these fields, but there are C data fields. So we take them and then you do whatever you want with them. What iTunes and the podcasting player does is they just strip out any HTML. And that's a, you know, the standard thing to do because they know that these things are typically generated through websites. Cool. This iTunes summary again, this is going to be your description, right? This is what people see on your iTunes page underneath the title. You've got your long, you've got a fairly, how many characters do you put in here? Well, these- 2000, up to 2000. For iTunes. Okay, so this is your big description. Now this isn't something that gets, but we've done iTunes and SEO before. So, but it doesn't matter if they, they don't look at this description for SEO. Right, Daniel? Right, iTunes doesn't. Google Play does. And a couple other podcast apps. You should always just consider that, again, this goes back to filling everything out. Like just assume, write well-made titles, write well-made descriptions, assume because when this stuff changes, you don't have to worry about it if it's done well. So have a good description. Obviously beyond SEO, it's most important that people can read it and it makes sense and it's friendly to read. So this is a chance for someone, if they've seen your show, they check the title, they like the artwork and they want to know a little bit more about it, you're going to put that in there. And we have the control to do that. It's going to be in your description, however you're making your feed. But right below that, I have an image. And this is, now this one is my iTunes image. It doesn't say iTunes image, but it's in sort of the iTunes section, right? So they don't think there's an iTunes image, it just says image. Don't we know why? There is an iTunes image, iTunes call an image tag specifically. And there's this regular image tag. So RSS has an image tag of its own. And most people don't realize this, but that image is supposed to, by the spec, it's supposed to be no larger than 140 pixels tall by 400 pixels wide, a rectangular image. That's just your RSS2 image. That's not the 1400 by 1400, but many systems like Lipson actually, sorry Dave, Lipson does this wrong because Lipson is putting in the full image, your iTunes image into the RSS2 image field, which is just image, not iTunes call an image, but just image, that should be a smaller image. Right now there's some discussion about, shouldn't this be bigger? But it's handy to have a small image inside of your RSS feed for those apps and directors that need it. Yeah, no, that's great info. So yeah, you'll see if the round table one is 3000 because I don't think Dave, we don't have in power press, you can select a different RSS2 image size, but Lipson, you cannot, right? No, your iTunes image is under, again, your show settings. So, and then you can have... And that's inherited into the RSS2 image. It appears to be, yeah. And right below that, I have title. Now we talked a little, I have title up above where I was saying I've got the subtitle, I've got the... This is the image title. Image title, okay. So if you were to like hover over the image. Yeah, depending on how the reader reads it. Okay. And we got more C data below that, it's a link. iTunes author, in this case, I'm putting my own name, rare tag, but I'm doing again a tagline, so to speak. I've got a couple of keywords in there. This is also debatable, dangerous little tag. If you have a chance to put in, I mean, Lipson, did they say author, Dave? Is this what the box is for this? It says iTunes, let's see, there's owner name and email, owner email, I believe is where that is coming from. I think Lipson calls it either artist or author. The owner thing is that top level. Yeah, I've got that there too. Then there's also in your show settings, there's public contact email. So this is again, this is the show level. So iTunes author. So wherever you can put in your author, now this is searchable on iTunes. We talk about iTunes again, because they are still the 800 pound gorilla, but I put a few keywords in there. Now I don't stuff it, but a couple of things I wouldn't mind being, and it really tells you a little bit more about me, and that's the key. It's not just random keywords about anything. It says podcast producer, trainer, stuff like that. It should always focus on the creators, the authors of the podcast, not who is in the podcast, like just your guests. So like, sorry Glenn, but your name would not belong in the podcast was round table author tag, because you've been a guest. But so the right way to do that would to put it in your episode title, which we'll get to, right? I mean, there is an option for you in that searchable for iTunes. So a lot of people don't understand that. And a lot of times your show that you've had, I had Glenn for a guest. And if I put him in the episode title, he might rank better for his own show because he did not use the author tag, right? I've seen that before. So it's important. Again, fill it out if it's there. Fill it out correctly. So iTunes keywords, now this is something that iTunes doesn't claim to use anymore, right? Daniel, what are these iTunes keywords and why are they still here if they're not using them? Yeah, keywords on the internet have been a dying thing for a while, like meta keys, meta tags, keywords. They don't aren't used by Google on your website. Many plugins like Yoast SEO no longer has the keywords field. PowerPress no longer has the keywords field. iTunes or Lipson Steel offers it. Interestingly, TuneIn does use the iTunes keywords tag. And so there's been a request that PowerPress reopened that field and allow people to add it. But TuneIn is the one that's kind of making a crime here in that they're supporting a tag that's been deprecated. So they shouldn't be supporting it. I think the general thought of why our keywords being keeled off is because people abuse it too much and load it up with all kinds of unrelated things or just spam it out. That's why you gotta watch out for that other tag. I noticed some directories are using it now because iTunes doesn't use it. It's pretty much guaranteed not to be abused. So now it's now something good to go back to. I noticed something in mine where I have like how to podcast, but it's all crammed together as one word. So that's not actually working. Like if I wanted how to podcast, it looks like you can only use one word in this section, at least when it comes to Lipson or is that how iTunes is doing it? What's going on there? Do you guys, I don't know if you see that. Mm-hmm. But it looks like you can't use two words as one keyword. It is a keyword. Some places that support keywords have different ways that they'll address that. They may say that you can't have spaces in your keywords. And so if you were to put in how to podcast, separated by spaces, you would get three different keywords, how to and podcast, like I am Groot, those three things. But with the way that this system is doing it, what Lipson must have done is it removed the spaces so that you still get a single keyword, but then again, what's using those keywords that matters. Yeah, in my case, I mean, this is gibberish. Like even if it tune in using my how to podcast, I mean, it's just gibberish. So something to fix, probably. Think of it as a hashtag. You know, we can run things together with hashtags. It is hashtag, at how to podcast. I don't know who that is, don't add them. All right, so iTunes category, now this is something that has changed. I see my, it says iTunes category, there are three, technology, and then category is like a sub under that podcasting. Daniel, you know what has changed here. What's going on? Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, breaking news. Breaking news. Apple hasn't announced this publicly, but their spec has changed so that there was a little while that they said if there's a category, like say technology, if there's a category that has subcategories, they have previously said and instructed power press developers to do this that you must select a subcategory. You could not select a top level category or business, for example, you couldn't just be in the business category. You had to be in the management and marketing category or some subcategory. More recently, they've reversed that. And so an upcoming power press update will allow you to select those top level categories again so that you could just be in the technology category or the business category or something like that. There are ways that iTunes looks at these categories, like you can go into a top level category very easily in iTunes. It's not so easy to go into a subcategory in iTunes. So the way that they're now allowing people to be in the top level categories, I think that's a good decision. But one thing to note, you can have as many categories as you want to put in. Feedburner lets you put in five categories, power press lets you put in three categories, Libsyn, what is it? Three categories, Dave? Yeah, three. iTunes only looks at really the first one. That's where you'll be ranked. That's what will show up in your iTunes listing. It's really the first one that matters. The other ones are just kind of additional places to be found. You'll be found in iTunes in those additional places though, right? Right, but the main one is the first one. So if you're trying to stand out in your category, would it be better to pick something that is less crowded? So in my case, we are in technology, although my top level is the subcategory of podcasting. I actually am in the right place. Most people are with me there and they're not. Everyone here is. A lot of people are podcasting. Yes, a lot of people are podcasting. We need to rehab that. Hey, Steve, fix that. All right, so technology though, I'm in that. Like, man, I don't, a podcasting roundtable doesn't really want to compete against TWIT or something else that is just, I'm not gonna rank in that. So I don't know, what do you guys think? What's the best way to go here? Is it better to be the best fit for your show or better to be somewhere where you think you might have a chance of actually bumbling to the top? The way I see it is, what's most important is pick what makes sense. If you are in a subcategory and you rank really well in that subcategory, you will be displayed in the top level category. But I think look at it this way, if you're looking at the business category, for example, and you realize that none of those subcategories do actually fit you, but you know you're a business podcast, put yourself in the top level category. It's a little bit more general and not as specific. That's my perspective. Yeah, I'm the same way, makes sense. But in the end, I always tell people, you know, if you're relying on being found in iTunes, you know, it's crowded no matter where you are. So make sure you have a subscribe button on your website for both iTunes and Android, because there's so much noise coming out now. It's like being found in iTunes, getting tougher and tougher. And I'll tell you what, if you go over to podcasurantletable.com slash found, $3,000 and I will get you a new noteworthy and you don't have to worry about any of this. And guess what, if you go to that link, it's gonna be a 404 and it's exactly what I'm offering you, basically broken, basically flushed money down the tube. I'm not offering that, so that's a joke. It's a joke about being found in iTunes. Don't worry about it so much, all right? Cool, well that gives us some good overview of the categories, I like that. iTunes image, now here's the iTunes specific image. In Lipson, that's gonna be the same thing, but Daniel, are you creating different images for iTunes versus that RSS too? You still doing that? It's the same image, what you see is the same, but they're different dimensions. So in the iTunes image, yeah, I use the as big as I can make it without going above half a megabyte. So I think that would be a 3,000 by 3,000 depending on the detail in your image. And I put the 144 by 144 in the regular RSS. This is hilarious. So the next thing, I just, okay, so I was in DC for the last week and I met up with a friend who had started a podcast and so I was showing him some stuff, like description of showing some of this stuff in his app. And he goes, you swear on this show? And I was like, no, but they were all marked explicit and I forgot all about it. Here we are, iTunes colon explicit for the round table. Yes, this isn't an explicit show, I don't swear. I don't even know how that happened. So something got marked wrong. I need to go fix that. So let me write that down. So this is where you need to define. Now this is iTunes specific. Now iTunes has some very strict rules about this, right? Not as strict as I think they should be. And it's, this is another thing that seems to have changed. You probably heard, I think Dave was at early 2015 that iTunes started displaying things automatically, like clean or explicit automatically. I know for a while that, yeah, because it used to be if you didn't pick one, they would just not show anything. And then they would just start picking one for you. Well, yeah, so if you didn't have it. Oh, really? Maybe when you submit, it's a good way to get yourself in trouble too. If you get caught. Don't have anything there. If you don't have one there, what it used to do is it wouldn't display either a clean or an explicit tag. And I liked that because I kind of considered explicit to be the, you know, the rated R kind of stuff. But I assumed untagged was kind of PG level stuff. You know, something that you would see or hear on TV or on the radio that was fine to be untagged. And then clean was this absolutely must have nothing that could be considered profanity, must be kid friendly. Now, if they're saying it's black and white, it must be either clean or explicit. I think that's a little too black and white. But I am seeing a lot of feeds in iTunes, featured podcasts in iTunes have no tags. So I think that they may be allowing you to have no tags. Again, their documentation is not clear on this to say you must have a tag. It just says, if your tag contains this value, we display this. If your tag contains these values, then we display the clean tag or the explicit tag. It doesn't say anymore. We used to say a couple of years ago, it used to say if you don't display anything or if you don't have this tag, then we don't display the explicit or clean tag. It doesn't say that anymore. It doesn't allow the tag to be empty. But I'm getting people saying that, you know, if the tag is not there, they can't get it submitted. See, I don't know about that because I see, I do see featured podcasts that don't have that tag. So I think- Have they been around for a while though? No, they're fairly recent. And they're being featured by Apple, like in the top banner. So- It's another myth that, you know, Eichin says that if your image is not like this, you can't get featured. If your blood of dollars can't be featured. Tons of featured podcasts have the worst feeds. Bad images. Images, yeah. Yeah, that one's always, is hear that over and over again. It's like, well, it's subjective, but I mean, that's pretty obvious to me. That's because those podcasters paid $8,000 to get a new Noteworthy. Yeah. Okay, that's a thing. Slash found, that's all I'm saying. Hey, so, okay. What's the general recommendation here? I mean, here's the, obviously you can tell this is something that changes one way or the other. And this is probably a section, if we got into, we don't have time. Dave, do you think we can do an hour? We're well over and we're not stopping. Great round. This was a little problem. See, it's always the unexpected stuff. You never know. Tune in. No, I'm not talking about the app. Tune into the show. But here, in general, you should probably just, I mean, I don't want to tell people, it has to be black girl. Decide, like you can't ever say, I mean, Glenn said crap and we're not going to put an explicit tag on this, right? I mean, do your best. I don't know. What's the general recommendation here? Now, can you do it? Can we change? We haven't gotten into show level or episode level stuff yet. What if I have one show that's explicit, but the rest aren't? Let's save that for when we talk about episode level. Yeah, we're almost there. We are marching. I think we're almost there. We are there. We're almost there. All right, so this is still sort of, this is still channel slash show level stuff, your podcast, not your podcast episodes. So after that, I have iTunes owner. We've kind of dealt with that. This is how iTunes is going to email you. So make sure you have the right iTunes there. Have your name and description. More C data stuff here. Now this is just description. This is an iTunes summary. Daniel, what were you saying is the difference here? Yeah, description is the official RSS tag. So if you don't have your iTunes summary tag for your show level, iTunes will fall back to use the description field. But I think the description field may be limited to fewer characters than the iTunes summary tag. Here's a fun one. Don't go anywhere, Daniel. iTunes subtitle. Wait, what? Where is that? What the heck does an iTunes subtitle show up? This is what I think should be one of the most useful tags in iTunes. But the iTunes show level subtitle shows up currently as of early 2017 in one very secluded place inside of the desktop iTunes app in your current subscriptions when you're viewing them in list format. That is the only place you'll see it. So useful. However, other apps. And when I did an episode recently of the Audacity podcast, theaudacitypodcast.com slash podcast SEO if you wanna listen to it, I did more research on what other fields other apps do search and index. And some of the other apps are actually indexing the iTunes subtitle and searching that and displaying that. Like Stitcher, for example, will display your iTunes subtitle instead of your overall show description. So that's good because John Moore in the chat, he says, does Stitcher use the iTunes RSS? Sort of a different question, but related. Overcast as well, indexes, or shows the subtitle tag instead of the full description tag. So it is important to put something in there extremely short that describes your podcast, but it's not the most important field at least not currently. Yeah, and back to that Stitcher what John's asking there, I mean, you fill out information at Stitcher. Stitcher's a little different. It's a different animal because it's not like they are pulling your RSS feed necessarily. You do need to go to Stitcher to do some extra stuff, right? No. Don't you have to go to Stitcher to sign up and submit your podcast? Well, you have to go over and submit your RSS feed. They also asked for your address, which I still haven't quite figured out why. They're gonna send you all that money they're making you, Dave. That's true, exactly. One dollar for everyone you refer to install the Stitcher app. Do you guys remember that? I get paid for the ads. Don't you guys get paid for the ads? I don't get paid for the ads. I'm kidding. But no, they just pull things out of your feed, but you do have to go over all these. You have to, you know, the biggies. iTunes, Google Play Music, TuneIn, and Stitcher. You all have to go over and submit once and get accepted, and then you're syndicated. Something would like Stitcher, if you have a change, it used to be, didn't you have to, maybe they changed it, didn't you have to go to them to say, hey, I made this change, like a title or something, right? Refresh my feed, yeah. Yeah, you can now in Stitcher, you can change what RSS feed they're using, but if your current RSS feed changes something about it, like your title, your cover art, something, I think, at least last I knew, you did have to ask them to refresh that information. Check it out. We're at our first, in my case, round, call these rounds, but they're episode. We've hit the episodes in our feed, something that's gonna change all the time, and this is 88, the last one was 87, like we had channel up above, and I now have item. So an item is going to be an episode, and right at the top there, I have the title. Now I don't know how much we need to dive into any of this, per se, we will get a little bit. I got- Well, here's something to know, is many of these RSS tags are used in both the channel or the show level and the item or episode level. So that's why you'll see a channel level title and an episode level title. You'll see a show level, author tag, and an episode level author tag. So they are then specific to this episode, and then every episode can have different information inside of that tag. It's using the same tag, same formatting, same limitations, all of that as the overall channel, but now it's describing one specific episode. Cool, and then I got a bunch of iTunes stuff. We've got description, we've got iTunes image. Now this one's interesting because, okay, what's the difference here? What iTunes image for an episode? What's going on here? This is the one that the podcast app has supported back and forth, and I don't even know anymore where it is on this. Not all apps will support this, but this would be your episode specific image. I do this with the Audacity to podcast. Every episode has its own unique image. I think Dave does it too. I think the best people who do it are no agenda podcasts. Their listeners create an image for them while they're recording the show live, and then that's used as the episode image. So it's original artwork every single time. But where does this show up? So iTunes, I mean, most people are listening to iTunes, it doesn't matter. Yeah, this shows up depending on the app you're using and how you've put this in, like iTunes, desktop iTunes and overcast would load your episode specific image from your ID three tags, at least currently. Some other apps load your episode specific image from this iTunes image tag inside of the individual episode field or the item level image. So the best thing is, if you're going to use individual episode images, put it in this tag and put it in your ID three tags. And when we say put it in this tag, now everyone is limited. People are saying, well, well, I create my feed this one way. That's pretty much how it's gonna be done. You either have the option to do this or you don't. Right? I mean, this isn't something, if you're hand coding, you're doing anything you want, you can put all these in and you're gonna break it because you're gonna put one wrong character, but if you're lips in, you either have the opportunity to do it if you're on WordPress. So it depends on where you're creating. So we're saying do this, but basically depending on where you create your feed is gonna depend on what options you actually have. Yeah, and like with PowerPress, it's something you need to go in and enable. You can do that inside of your settings, inside of PowerPress, enable the option to do this, but you don't have to worry about putting your show level artwork, your main cover art in every episode. It'll be inherited automatically. You don't have to do that. Right? Yeah. Okay, and we got a description here. Anything else we want to cover in an episode specific? I got iTunes duration. This is something that's gonna be like automatically picked up, right? Well, if we go back to the subtitle, it works the same way that Daniel was talking about here on the episode title or episode kind of scenario here where if I add a subtitle, iTunes desktop will display the subtitle. And I think when you put your mouse over the little I on the right hand side, it'll then show your description. If I don't put a subtitle, it'll just take the first sentence of my description and use it as the subtitle. Here's one underneath the iTunes image, which we talked about. Description, that's not an iTunes specific. It's description. I have links in here that are clickable. Some places this works, right? Where now I'm doing this because I'm hoping that I can say, hey, in the app that you're listening right now, go click the link to sign up to be a guest and your app would actually be clickable. That link, right? But does this happen in iTunes app? Is it clickable? Yeah, and most apps now they are supporting hyperlink data is working here. Or they're honoring it or whatever. It would be iTunes summary at the item level would be supported first. If that doesn't exist, then it falls back to this description tag. There is even, it's not in your feed, but there is even a content colon encoded tag and that would be the entire contents of your show notes. So like you might put out a blog post and the entire everything from your show notes that you write either in Libsyn PowerPress or whatever displays inside of content encoded. But then your short summary displays in the summary and the description. So what you said summary, but we have iTunes subtitle, right? That's what Dave was describing. Okay. Well, your feed, right. So Libsyn is not creating an iTunes summary because iTunes would look at the summary. If that doesn't exist, iTunes falls back to the description field. So, Libsyn is just saying, we don't really need to put in an iTunes summary. So we'll just use the description field since. What is subtitle and where is that displaying then? iTunes subtitle. Yeah, where Dave was saying, in the store. Most of the time, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, okay, I lost my question there. And the tricky part we should mention on the podcast app and I really wish they would fix this is when you, I'm gonna click once on my show. I'm gonna click one more time on my episode. It's starting to play. I now have to click on the very, very bottom. I know it's an audio thing, but the very bottom player to bring up the episode that brings up my artwork, I click again and or if I drag up again, now somewhere in here. Side, I think you go to the side. If I click on the artwork, I then can see my clickable links. It's just that easy on the podcast app. And these are reasons why people use different apps. Yeah, that's why I use Overcast. So it is, they're there in the podcast app, you just have to keep clicking and pushing and swiping and, but it is there. It does seem to be a popular enough thing that you might be able to tell people in your podcast app, tap the cover art or tap the image to see these links if you put those links in there. That is seeming to be a more universally supported thing. I know Overcast podcast app, I believe Pocketcast and Downcast do it that way as well. I've seen plenty of times where descriptions, they're truncated with the dot, dot, dot, or some people have their entire show notes in there, right? And Daniel, you mentioned this a little bit. How is Daniel, Dave, can I put, is there a limit? Is Lipson gonna truncate my description at some point? That I'm not sure of, but if it's truncated, my first guess would be, I bet they're putting that in as a subtitle because the subtitle field has less characters than the summary. So... Yeah, subtitle is limited to, I believe, 255, and the summary is limited to, again, 2,000 characters. So if you have more than 2,000 characters, the app just won't display it. If you're seeing dot, dot, dot, that might be something that's in your feed creation tool that's putting in the dot, dot, dot, like the WordPress feeds. If you don't use the excerpt field, then by default they'll grab the first paragraph and truncate it with the dot, dot, dot. Daniel, were you doing something different than you mentioned there's another tag. What are you doing differently here than I'm doing here on the roundtable? So there is an iTunes summary tag, which it's just an order and fallback order for iTunes that if there's an iTunes summary, iTunes and the podcast app will read that first. If that doesn't exist, it falls back to description. It's really a side thing you don't really have to worry about because they're both supported. It's just an order of priority. And I heard, Daniel, I heard that the summary gives you bonus points. I complain if you don't have a summary in the Cast Feed Validator. Bonus points in what sense? Like it's not searchable. It's hard to use the summary than the description probably just because it's longer. I think so, yeah. I think the RSS description tag is limited more than the iTunes summary tag. But if you're not putting in loads and loads of text, then you don't have to worry about it. Content encoded tag has no limit. And iTunes might display that if there's no description. If people don't put a summary in, they put the description in. You're saying that you give them a little like... Warning. Warning, like you should be doing this. Yeah. And that's great. Now, you know, Glenn is literally Oz. Like he's the man behind the curtain. You're like, why is Cast Feed... It's Glenn's decision. He's telling you, fix it. Now, okay, little confusing because iTunes summary in the episode is not, I don't not have that in here. I have iTunes subtitled. Is that available in Lipson, Dave? iTunes summary. That one, I'm, hmm. I can hear Crystal cursing at me right now. Well, it's, I believe this is the way it is. iTunes summary, keep this in mind. It's that priority thing and fallbacks. I believe Lipson has just made the decision that we're not going to put that text in the iTunes summary tag. We'll just put it in the description tag because that's what podcast apps use. In fact, there was for a little while, Apple was skipping the iTunes tag and using the description tag instead. I think they fixed that since then. And I think that's what inspired Lipson's decision. Yeah, as I look at the, as an episode here, I don't see a spot for that. Now, we always, in every episode, you can go into the advanced options and there's always a way if you want to add that tag manually, you could. Cool. All right, well, I mean, that takes us mostly. I mean, I do have an iTunes explicit for the episode. Now, I was always marked clean for me. That's just that the show level has got miss marked. What's that? Yeah, so before we jump up to things, let's talk about the clean tag. Each individual episode will inherit whatever the top level is. So if your show is overall set to clean all of your individual episodes will inherit that or if it's over right. So you're saying that my explicit, because this is a good example. So this is why I did it, completely why I did it. This is an example for this round. So my episodes right now in the iTunes, they're displaying as explicit, even though it says clean in the tag, it's because that show level tag is explicit, right? Your individual episodes are displaying the explicit sign? I believe so. I think that's right, it should be clean. Yeah, because each individual episode can overwrite the show level. Okay, oh, I thought you were saying it was the opposite. I thought you were saying that the channel level overwrites them all. The output level can overwrite. If you don't put an explicit tag in the individual episode, then it inherits whatever the show level is. But if you put something there, then it overwrites whatever the show level is. So there is an issue here. If you have an otherwise clean podcast and you have one explicit episode, that can get your entire podcast kicked out of the India store, iTunes store, as well as a couple other iTunes stores that don't allow any explicit content. So there is a separate tag, you don't see it here, but there is a separate iTunes block tag that prevents that episode from displaying in the iTunes store, but it doesn't prevent subscribers from downloading it. So if you have an otherwise clean podcast and you have one explicit episode and you don't wanna get kicked out of those other stores, then you can block that one episode from displaying in the store, but your subscribers still receive it. How do you do that? The way Lipson handles this is that you can actually put in extra tags, right? The Lipson, Dave gives you the option to put, but it's a cautionary thing. You need to know what you're doing. Yeah, it's one of those things where, you know, you'd wanna Google the code to make sure you've got it right. And then, you know, it's basically probably iTunes block, colon, something. How many feeds do you fix with someone who's put some weird junk in there? Do you see that as that common? People are just like, I wanna type something in here and try it. On occasion, not as much as you would think, usually with feeds, the biggest problem is somebody copies and paste from Word, or they copy and paste from WordPress, and then they're put in an iFrames and all sorts of tables and things like that that just mess up the feed profusely. But not in iTunes. Well, it's interesting, Lipson actually has a tool that you can click on. You'll see where it says rescan, and it will scan the information to look for the obvious things that will break your feed, and then it will tell you, okay, on line 36, it has something. And that's usually, for me, anytime I ever see that, it's because I've gotten lazy and copied and pasted something from WordPress. Yeah, that's newer. I do enjoy that and it does help. There are a couple of tags earlier on, at least in the order they're displayed on your posts, that are very important. Pubdate, GUID, and Link. The Pubdate is the published date of this particular episode. And by default, that's how most podcast apps will sort your episodes, by their published date. There is an iTunes order tag you can use to force episodes to display in a particular order, regardless of their published date. But by default, it's the Pubdate. The GUID stands for Globally Unique Identifier. And that's what many podcast apps, I believe actually all of them, basically look at that to see if this changes, or if this is anything different, then that means this is a new post. This is why, and I ran into this. It's not quite right. That's got to stay the same. That GUID identifies the item or the episode. So it should never, ever change. No, it should. But you're saying if it does, this is what happens. Yeah, if you have, so let's say episode 87, if you want to force episode 87 to re-download. Right, because there's a mistake and I want people to hear the new thing. Yeah, you could change the title, you can change the text, you can change the enclosure, you can change everything about that post. But as long as that GUID is the same, podcast apps won't be forced to re-download it. Now, if they're subscribing for the first time, they will download the correct episode. But if you wanted to force a re-download, then you have to change that GUID. Every post has a different GUID and it might follow a different format. That's a dangerous way to do it though. Yeah, because that's the only thing that anchors the episode to the world, right? So if you change that, you're going to get two episode number 47s or whatever. Well, in this case you're replacing it, right? Cause here's the thing, like there's a replace feature in Libsyn, which you can replace Dave, right? Like say I want you to replace the episode. I made a mistake, it's so egregious, I needed to update and replace. So the new people got that episode, the old people, they already got it, whatever. If you use a replace feature in Libsyn, it's not going to change the GUID. But if you want to replace those, if you want those old people to say, there is something new here that you got before, then you need to delete it. Like in this case at Libsyn, you would delete and redo a new one. You'd probably have to order it by pub date at that point. But you could literally, for someone who got it and you're like, no, I really need to reach that person, not that they're going to get it, you could force it to say, there's something new here that you already got. Think of it as the episode you released is catastrophically bad. Not just you forgot to edit something out, but it's horrible, it's unlistnable. Your co-host audio is completely gone. I've had problems like that before, you accidentally overlapped your different voices. If it's a catastrophic problem, then you would want to force people to re-download the correct episode. And then that's when it's a good idea to put in the title to say something like fixed. Or fixed. Repost. You see that a lot. Well, repost. I don't like the word repost because it sounds like you're just reposting your episode. Re-hashing old content. Yeah, but if you put in fixed, then people will realize, oh, okay, this is the one that's fixed. I should listen to this one instead. And the easiest way to change that, to repost it is instead of trying to change the GUID, which you really don't want to try and do, especially if you're doing like find and replace on your database, don't change the GUID. They'll force a re-download of all your past episodes. So if you have to change the GUID or republish an episode, the best way to do it is just create a new post in your content management system, WordPress or Libsyn or whatever, and then copy all your data into it, change the title to say fixed. And that'll be essentially the same thing. Delete that former episode, create the new post that's basically a duplicate, but it won't have it. This can happen when people move their feeds. Right. Yeah. It already downloaded. Inmature podcast hosting companies do not inherit the GUIDs. Blueberry and Libsyn do. So if you transfer your RSS feed to Blueberry or Libsyn, they will inherit the GUIDs so it won't force a re-download of all of your past episodes. But bad podcast hosts, and there are some very prominent podcasters here which just some bad podcast hosting companies forget to change or forget to inherit the GUID and that's why you'll suddenly see 200 episodes are being forced to re-download. Listeners of this show right now are going, wait a minute, that happened to me. That happened to the show. There was a thing where when I did that change over, there was a weird, because I was actually going from Libsyn to Libsyn, don't ask how I was doing it. There was a unavoidable change of that GUID. I think it was unavoidable. So anyways, I am sorry. It happens to the best of us. But yeah, this is the things that can happen and most people will never know what that's going on. Well, here's a surprise. That GUID is optional. There are feeds out there without that in and I can't say that's a bad feed. Wow. I thought that was a required RSS tag. No. So what you have to do as a reader, basically what they do if the GUID isn't there, they use the URL, which is not a good fall. It's the best you can do, but it's not that good a fallback. I do have a URL here. I have enclosure length type and a URL. Did you talk about to that one they're using? No, you just have to say you don't have a GUID, so I have to have something to anchor the episode to. That's what I'm saying. The link tag. Yeah, yeah. And the link tag is think of this as this is your show notes link. So like in Libsyn, if you're generating your feed with Libsyn, by default, the link. So if someone is just subscribed to your RSS feed with an RSS reader like Feedly, and they click on the item to open it in their browser, by default, Libsyn will take them to your Libsyn website where that episode is published. On Libsyn, you can override that to say, no, my permalink for this episode should be my website with the show notes for this. And then PowerPress and WordPress will just put in whatever the post URL is for that item. Cool. Well, okay. Longest round, maybe ever. I am that guy who would say best round ever. Like I'm loving this. They're like, there was so much content here. It's ridiculous. This is amazing. So if you're still listening to us, thank you. And yeah, cool, cool round. What else, Daniel? Well, there's a tag here that's the most important tag ever for podcasts. Thank you. iTunes call the new and noteworthy? And no. I don't know they had that. Is that new? $8,000. New and noteworthy, yes. Is new and noteworthy? Yes. The enclosure tag is what turns a podcast feed or it turns an RSS feed into a podcast feed. You do not have a podcast feed unless your individual episodes have this enclosure tag. And that's the link to your multimedia file. Right. Something you don't get from a typical blog feed. How are you getting this enclosure tag? Cause I guess this is what I'm saying. How are you changing yourself from a blogger to a podcaster this enclosure day? Well, with PowerPress, it's when you put the URL to the MP3 that triggers the enclosure tag with Libsyn. It's when you add the media in there and then tell it to go into your feed. With Libsyn, when you have the ability to say, it's weird, you can upload a file but not have it go into your feed. And back in the day, there's my Dave Jackson impression, this is something that Feedburner could do for you is you could tell it, whatever the first multimedia link is in a post, turn that into an enclosure. Now that's unnecessary because we have so many tools that can put that enclosure in for you. Very cool. Well, if you look in my feed, the next thing you're gonna hit is close an item and we're gonna start a new item. That's just the next round, the next episode. So, hey, we did it. I don't think there's anything at the end of this. Right? We were just, once you get to the very end. Well, at the very, very end, you should have a thing that says end of channel. End of channel, end of RSS. Yeah. Nothing else to see here. Turn out the lights. You're done. So, well, very cool. Glenn, was there anything you wanted to, I mean, okay, real quick, since he took the time to, Ryan, Muniac, I hope I'm saying that right. He was asking, I asked if you wanted to, to know anything specific. He asked for tips, tricks, hacks, code breakdowns, what's really necessary, what's not needed, like the length number and good free tools for working on your RSS. I'm like, we can't dive into all that. Is there anything in here? No, I think we've kind of hit on things that are necessary and not. I mean, I think you have to filter it from our conversation, but you can see some things, if you didn't include that we picked up by something else, right? And if you're using a host, I mean, how do you, what's the, let's go this way. What's the most common way you see a feed broken? Dave, you do support all day. What's the one thing people are leaving out or doing wrong that's breaking their feed constantly? Copying and pasting from other programs. Cause it brings, you don't see it. But it's copying and pasting it into the, in our case, there's Lipson gives you a box or it's a description. Yeah. So they copy it from Word. They click in their description and they go control V for paste. And with some program with, I believe it's a Apple and a Mac thing. I believe if you go Apple or Daniels, control shift V. Control shift V on Windows, command shift V on Mac. It works pretty much in any program. Yeah. Okay. So we'll let that publish. Now Lipson validates. Now, will it let me publish the episode if I'm about to break it? Yeah. We let you know, we put up a little red thing and going, hey, look, it's, you've got some things here that you shouldn't do. But yeah, as always Lipson gets you, you are a hundred percent in control. We just try to steer you in the right direction. But the thing I have to realize is then if your feed goes valid, I'm not sure how long it takes, but eventually it's invalid. Invalid, yeah. iTunes will go, this doesn't work and they might pull your show. And when you get pulled, it's getting it back in can be a rough road. So wanna, you know, that's one of the things that you just wanna, number one, you should always subscribe to your own show. That's an easy way to tell if your feed is, you know, not working. And that's the other thing. If you, let's answer this question since we're talking feeds. If you look at your phone and you're a subscriber to your own show and you got the episode, but you go to iTunes and it's not in your iTunes listing. It takes 24 hours for it to appear in the listing, but your subscribers will have it instantly. I need it there now, Dave. And now I'm freaking out. I posted it 20 minutes ago. It's on my phone. Why isn't it in iTunes? It's on iTunes. Yeah. You know, it's funny. Apple has gotten that question. Why isn't my latest episode showing up? They've gotten it so much that it's now in their official FAQ for iTunes. And that issue that Dave, you talked about, they'll tell you when they're going to yank it too. It's in there. If your stuff is broken, they tell you when they'll yank it. They added those two things recently, as Daniel was alluding to. So Ryan sent that in. He says, free tools working with your RSS. People are like, why would you need that? He handcodes. We found someone. He does it. Just like that control. Maybe he's a control freak or that's just the way he's doing it. No one, not many people are doing that, but there are free tools available, right? So you can hit up any of these guys. If you're hand coding, get in touch, but we won't deal with that too much. But yeah, I mean, also another good reason to go to castfeedvalidator.com. Check your feed once in a while. Make sure it's not broken. But we're going to wrap it up. That was great. Thanks again, seriously, if you tuned into this one. This may, we may have set a record on the round table. Excellent. The one we thought we wouldn't get through went the longest. Thanks a lot, guys. We are going to just let us know real quick where we can find your show or your service for Glenn. That's not new, Daniel. Thanks for joining us. Once again, co-host Daniel J. Lewis. Thank you very much. I'm over at the Audacity to podcast, giving you the guts and teaching the tools to launch or improve your podcast and on Twitter at the Daniel J. Lewis. Oh, that's different. All right, you got that updated. It's been a while now. Dave Jackson, co-host and coordinator. Thank you, sir. Yeah, Dave Jackson, schoolpodcasting.com. Not just showing you how to podcast, but showing you how to podcast right. Well, everyone, is this like a theme because we're going with the subtitle? Yeah. Or no, tagline, sorry. We're going with our taglines today. All right, I'm about to scroll back up to this feed and see what I have. I don't have memorize. All right, Glenn, your first round table. Thank you so much. You don't think you expected to be here this long. No one. Thank you very much. Yeah, you could find me at KSV Validator. Also, I've got a new podcasting player coming out called Serialized. If you want to beta test that, go on to serialized.com. Very cool. How do you spell that? Serialized like you'd expect. Really, you got serialized.com. I did. Wow, impressive. All right, well, I'm checking it out for that reason alone. That's it. All right, come back next time for round 89. Thanks again, everybody. Wave goodbye. We are out of here. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.