Recently, I was asked the following question by a listener of my podcast:

Hi Roberto. I’m a huge fan, and your show has inspired my friend and I to start our own podcast. As you seem to be as huge tech geeks as we are, we were hoping we could get some advice on how to properly host/stream/feed etc. a podcast, as you already obviously do. I know it may seem weird for a random listener to ask for tech support, but as the Internet isn’t much help, you were the first person I thought of.

So, I figured I go through my current hosting stack and how I go about “making the sausage” in this post. First off, let’s talk about hosting. Currently I’m hosting my files on the great podcast hosting service libsyn. I won’t go into what plan I’m using, but if you’re starting out, they make it really easy to do pretty much everything for a podcast.

For the site as it stand today, I’m hosting it on my blog on the great people of Squarespace. Good hosting provider and if you end up picking them as your site host, there are a ton of offer codes out there for 10% off the lifetime of your contract. Here’s one right now : nsfwshow.

The RSS feeds gets sent directly to Google’s Feedburner service. In fact, if you ever said to yourself “You know, I  can’t remeber what the link was for Feedburner,” try feeds.cosmicradio.tv. It’ll get you there . Within Feedburner is where the magic happens and all the iTunes appropriate tags get added from image art to description. Not only does this help in getting things up and running quickly, but if you ever move hosting providers (like I’m planning to for the podcast), it lets you keep a consistent link without having to redirect itunes. Plus, if you’re an advanced user and know what a “CNAME” is, you can point to the Google service and have an even more professional looking link.

As to getting on the iTunes store, simply sumbit and wait for approval. Once that’s all set, you’ll get a happy email from Apple along with a crucial link : iTunes Ping. Remeber to keep this link as it’ll allow you to tell iTunes when your podcast is updated. Though iTunes does this eventually, it can go faster if you ping it, so just make sure to do this once your RSS feed is updated.

Other than those things comes more of the production side of stuff. If anyone is interested, I’d be more than happy to post all that as well. Hope this helps any starting off in their podcasting endeavors.