Care & Feeding of my Blog & Podcasts

I suppose I’m like most humans that struggle with organization. When my blog started nearly 8 months ago, I didn’t create categorization (or taxonomy) of my posts since I wasn’t really sure where blogging would lead me. Consequently, all of my posts were uncategorized and a bit of a mess.

Over the last few nights I’ve invested about 12 hours in creating categories and tagging my posts. If you look to the left at my categories, you’ll see 20 of them! I know, I know…Melvil Dewey would shake his head in disgust but I wanted to make certain my eclectic and diverse posts were covered.

Thinking I was done (oh, how we deceive ourselves), tonight I peeked at iTunes and there were only four of my 11 podcasts showing! What I didn’t realize was that the RSS feed was only displaying those podcasts it could “see” on my main blog page. Any that had rolled off were no longer seen by the feed and consequently by iTunes.

So I invested another few hours to re-publish all of my podcasts on a single podcast page, re-publish my feed at Feedburner and now everything shows up appropriately. What this will necessitate going forward is publishing my post on my blog *and* on the podcast page. A tiny bit more work but this will ensure all posts appear in iTunes or other podcatching program.

Phew! There are so many little gotcha’s like this that — in the words of your hero Mr. T – “I pity the fool” that tries to get all these pieces working right now. From content to recording to publishing online, this is still not easy.