Another podcast

After ten days, a manual update of Castopod, and a support ticket with 21 replies, the Talking with machines podcast is available on your favorite podcast platform.

My first episode of "Talking with machines" features a conversation with Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander around Bryan's recent "Some notes on how culture is responding to generative AI."

We had a lively and wide ranging discussion from our different points of view on how we are responding to AI through stories, art, religion, relationships, media, and symbols.

There is still much to figure out about finding an audience and how to organize themes and interests. We made a start.

Then came the technical challenges of distributing a new podcast.

First Apple made me use one of their machines to create an account (multiple attempts to create an Apple account on my PC failed). Then, when I couldn't upload the podcast to iTunes I had to manually update Castopod by replacing all but two files in my CPanel file manager. I couldn't figure out how to finish the update using the necessary commands in a terminal, but Taylor at Reclaim Hosting finished the update for me. That fixed the iTunes challenge, but then the real fun began.

After many failed attempts to connect to YouTube Podcasts, using several browsers, clearing caches, and turning off all the ad blockers, etc., the Reclaim security team (do they have badges?) checked all the Reclaim Cloud setting over a weekend. Same result. Taylor was able to connect to the feed in his YouTube Studio, why wouldn't work for me?

I learned about RSS validators, my feed link passed most of the checks, but there were some it didn't. I sent screenshots to the team. I even poked around in the Castopod files and found the rss_helper.php file and sent it along. I was in way over my head. Then suddenly, it worked. My first podcast is available on all the podcast distributors!

After all the work done by everyone, it ended with a shrug. Taylor's last reply was;
"Awesome! I'm really not sure what changed over the last day or so, as all of the changes we made to make sure no blocking was happening was earlier on. But hey a wins a win. Sometimes with platforms like these its hard to troubleshoot stuff [even?] when you can look at the log files!"

James Cridland recently wrote about "How Apple Podcasts works in China" on PodNews. He concluded with the reason I'm going through all this hassle:
"As ever - your best option to promote a podcast is to get your own website and your own RSS feed, and promote those - not simply to link to services like Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or Spotify."

Done.

Now to figure out the Fediverse linking and distribution and all the blogging metadata and SEO. Sigh.