Allison Sheridan has created a ScreenSteps (which looks very cool) tutorial on how to create a podcast feed for Feeder as part of her Podcasting on Podcasting series.

You can hear Allison give the tutorial on PoP Episode #9 (enhanced podcast) and read it on her site: Feeder Tutorial.

The Podcasting on Podcasting (PoP) series should prove very useful to budding podcasters as the entire process can be very daunting, as it covers everything from the technical side of recording equipment, software and web hosting on the one hand, and the creative aspect on the other, not to mention considerations such as time and family commitments.

Allison’s been podcasting for a long time now, and occasionally brings in other experienced contributors such as Don McAllister of the excellent ScreenCastsOnline.

The Podcasting on Podcasting series can be found as part of Allison’s main podcast, NosillaCast, at podfeet.com. Allison also contributes to the Mac Roundtable Podcast and the Mac ReviewCast.

Nick Brawn has written a post on scripting Feeder to publish Sparkle appcasts using Leopard’s Scripting Bridge and RubyCocoa, which as well as being potentially useful for developers, serves as an interesting example for this combination of technologies:

Link: Scripting Sparkle Appcasts with Feeder and RubyCocoa

Feeder 1.5.5 includes chages for Apple’s transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Generated URLs for new files published to your iDisk will now use a me.com rather than mac.com address, unless they are stored in the Sites folder (relating to http://homepage.mac.com), as it appears these will not change for MobileMe. Feeds and enclosures published to mac.com addresses will continue to work and do not need to be changed.

Konrad Lawson at The AppleScript Studio Workshop has written a comprehensive tutorial about including Sparkle for automatic software updates in an AppleScript Studio project. The tutorial also mentions Feeder as a way to create the appcast feed:

Link: The AppleScript Studio Workshop – Adding a Check Updates Feature

I released Feeder 1.5 earlier. While this is not as big a release as 1.4 and 1.3 before it, it does include a number of useful new features and improvements, particularly for video podcasters. Just about every part of the app has been tweaked in some way though, so I’ll highlight the main changes here. The Release Notes tell the full story.

User Interface

Firstly, the user interface has been updated for 10.5 Leopard, and because Feeder’s minimum system requirements are now for 10.4 and later, gets some new controls such as date pickers and token fields for things like iTunes keywords.

Feeder has worked fine on Leopard since the big cat’s release, but Leopard’s darker theme almost eradicated the subtle borders on some toolbar icons and the increased contrast made some of the colours appear too saturated. Also, the sidebar gets Leopard gradient and colours, and turns grey when the main window is inactive. These are minor changes but make a big difference.

Podcasting

Feeder’s podcasting support has been improved in particular for video podcasters. Video podcasts can now have thumbnails via Yahoo’s Media RSS extension. These thumbnails are used for video search results and application such as Miro (formerly Democracy Player).

Using the Media RSS extensions is as straightforward as checking “Use Media Extensions” in the Extensions section of the Info drawer (below the iTunes extensions, if you’re using them). That will show the Media Thumbnail field in the editor, where you can drag an image file to upload or specify the URL of an image that is already online.

Finally for video podcasters, this version improves performance when reading and tagging MP4 files, including those used for iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, etc.

Publishing

Another change useful for any podcaster is that Feeder now has the ability to redirect uploaded enclosure URLs through a site. This is useful for podcast sites concerned with statistics such as Blubrry. You can find the settings for this in the Enclosures section under Settings in the Info drawer.

Feeder’s publishing is now improved to (finally!) support password-less SFTP. This can be enabled by clicking the Options button in the Servers window for an SFTP server. It also allows the creation of additional servers for enclosures and images during publishing setup.

Sparkle

Last but not least, Sparkle appcasting support has been improved. It is now possible for Feeder to automatically generate MD5 sums and DSA signatures for enclosure files. The settings for these can be found in the Sparkle section under Extensions in the Info drawer. Finally, Feeder’s AppleScript has been improved and now includes the ability to edit Sparkle attributes.

Summary

Most Feeder releases have an overall theme and in this case it’s mostly about video podcasting, but also about further refining it in its current form. Feeder is a pretty mature product now and actually celebrates its 3rd birthday tomorrow. I have plenty of ideas and plans for Feeder for the next year, so stay tuned!