More About My Podcasting Experience with iWeb, Garage Band and dotMac

In a previous post, I talked about my good experiences with creating a podcast in Garage Band and using iWeb to upload it to dotMac.

I do have a couple of things to report (now that it's done) that didn't work out as well. These are small things, but I wanted you to know the gorey details just the same.

The podcast ended up being a very manageable size of 46MB for a 47 minutes podcast. I am very happy with the size reduction. The sound is good quality, especially the music. No complaints there.

The problems came when uploading the file to iTunes. The process seemed to go fine, but when control flipped over to iTunes, the podcast seemed to have the wrong thumbnail photo (I didn't even recognize it - some dark trees or something) and it also had the wrong title.

I found out that iTunes grabbed the sub-heading as the title of the podcast from iWeb, rather than the title at the top of the page in iWeb. That was a pain. So now the title of my podcast in iTunes is "Holistic News & Politics" instead of what it should be "Holistic Health Nation." Plus, it didn't translate the stupid ampersand (&) properly either. Double pain in the butt.

These two things will make my podcast look bad in iTunes, plus they might make it hard for people to find it.

Luckily, a search of "Holistic Health Nation" in iTunes will still produce my podcast, along with two others, so it shouldn't be too difficult to find. Plus, if people will search for "Kulak" (my last name) they'll also find my podcast, along with two songs in iTunes that look like some sort of Muslim religious songs (!?!).

Further, Apple provides a help page for podcasters on how to make changes to your podcast, but this stuff is incredibly techie stuff. The whole process, with Garage Band, iWeb and dotMac, is very user friendly, but GOD HELP YOU if you need to make changes once your podcast is in iTunes. The process from there on is very archaic. I'm a techie and I'm still hesitant to do all this crap they're suggesting.

Anyway, I'm very happy with the overall process. I'll continue using all these tools, and hopefully Apple will issue a bug fix on iWeb so iTunes takes the right stuff for the cover art (thumbnail image) and the podcast title.