Transcriptions, Podpress and Feedburner’s 512KB limit

Recently I’ve been setting up some WordPress blogs for clients who have their podcasts transcribed. As I mention in the book, I believe WordPress blogs make fantastic websites to host podcast, when used with the Podpress plugin. Transcriptions can be quite long and if you’re not careful this can cause the RSS feed automatically created by Prodpress to be too large for Feedburner which has a maximum size of 512KB.

If you find yourself in this sticky situation there are a couple of setting in WordPress to take a look at under Settings > Reading:

• For each article in a feed, show: select the Summary radio button. This causes only the first few lines of the post to go into each item description of the RSS feed for both the blog AND the podcast RSS feed created by Podpress.
• Syndication feeds show the most recent: select a reasonable number, not too big. This limits the number of items in both blog and Podpress feeds.

Meanwhile the book continues apace: approx word count: 17,600.

Archiving strategies for podcasters

As work on the book progresses, I thought I’d write a few thoughts on the ikky subject of archiving. Do not confuse this with backup, which is a completely separate and very important subject in its own right.

As podcasters, we do tend to produce some pretty big files. A typical WAV file comes in at around 10MB per minute. Record three 30 minute interviews a week and thats the best part of a GB per week if you want to keep those high quality WAV originals around. Add to that the file infrastructure that editing and mixing software adds, and the situation becomes even more scary. I have eight episodes of our Internet Marketing podcast languishing on my hard drive right now, taking up 8.93GB of disk real estate (284 files).

The problem is that as time progresses, your hard drive can get clogged up with huge files that you probably don’t need to access any more. We need a way of moving those files off our hard drive, but in a way that makes finding them again easy, just in case a client says, “You know that podcast you did for us two years ago. Well…”

Let me tell you about the archiving strategy  I use on my MacBook.

I have an Archive folder directly in my home folder. Inside that I have a Pending folder. As I identify stuff that needs to be archived, I move it to that Pending folder. I like to preserve the folder hierarchy of the files I’m archiving because it makes more sense when you come to search for things later. Every so often I check the size of the Pending folder, (select folder, Command-I), and when it approaches the golden size 4.7GB I know its time to burn another DVD pair. Now here comes the nice part. In order to make it easy to find stuff later we need to make an index. To do that I use the find command to make a list of all files in Pending and capture the results to a text file. In terminal just type:

  cd Archive/Pending
  find . > 20091113.txt

Notice I name the archive as today’s date. I then copy the resulting .txt index file into the root of my Archive folder, so I have a growing index there. At this point I burn the content of Pending onto TWO DVDs, label them with the same  name as my index file, keep one DVD in the office and one at home. Then I purge the contents of Pending ready for the next archive.

If I suddenly need to find a file or folder I use the grep command on my index files. Say I need a file called ninja02.wav, in terminal:

  cd Archive
  grep 'ninja02.wav' *.txt
  > 20091026.txt:./podcasts/2006/061109_dSCAPE/tue/ninja02.wav

The output from grep includes the file containing the search string at the front. So we can see that the DVD we need is the one labled 20091026.

Happy archiving.

Book progress: Approx. word count: 17,200.

Update 14/11/09:

To achieve similar results to find in Windows, use the recursive dir command:

  cd Archive\Pending
  dir /s /b > 20091113.txt