I stopped podcasting at the end of June this year. I was podcasting for the better part of 3 years and produced a weekly music podcast called Sats and Sounds for 100 episodes and almost 2 years without missing a week. I ended the other podcasts to focus on Sats and Sounds and then stopped altogether because it was clear things were getting more fractured in the Value4Value world. I didn’t want to continue if the artists weren’t going to get paid in any obvious way for the music I was playing. I’d like to continue but I want tools where I can create my podcasts on my own with no other service, other than my web host, to worry about or pay.
It’s not that I’m against paying. I just don’t want another monthly subscription. I wouldn’t mind paying one time for a piece of software that does what I need it to do. RSS feeds are basically text files in .xml format. If you look at one it’s easy to read in Notepad or any other text editor. It’s easy to read but tedious to create and edit in a standard text editor. There’s an online tool that I used to create the feed for Sats and Sounds. It’s called Sovereign Feeds. I love that tool. But, it’s hosted on someone else’s web server and if the site goes away so does my tool. There were times during Sats and Sounds where I wasn’t sure if I was going to get the episode out because Sovereign Feeds was offline or malfunctioning. This is not a criticism as the creator of that site was providing it for free (FYI, I put Sovereign Feeds in the splits, if you know what I mean, of all my podcasts) it’s just a fact. If you’re producing a podcast on a regular basis the last thing you want is for the tool you’re using to disappear. I don’t understand why a podcasting RSS feed creator/editor doesn’t exist.
I tried the whole vibe coding thing to build the tool I want. I tried, Grok, Co-Pilot, Claude, and ChatGPT. All of them come close to building something but it’s always just a bit off. Unless you write code for a living you’re most likely not going to be able to get the AI to build what you need. There was always something wrong. None of them created a tool that would properly ingest an existing feed. Some of them worked on a basic level but when trying to enhance it by having a tabbed interface or simply saving it in the correct .xml format it would fail. Every single one would produce something that looked promising at the start only to degrade and get deep in the shit the further you tried to tweak the app. It was a huge fail.
What I want is a simple tool like Microsoft’s XML Notepad that will work for podcasting RSS feeds. You would think XML Notepad would work because it’s schema agnostic. But it’s not friendly to editing an existing XML document. You can do it but it’s so cumbersome that it’s actually easier to do what I want to do in Notepad++.
Yes, I know there are some WordPress plugins that create the feed and there are podcast hosts that will do that to. But my podcasting will never be popular enough to warrant a dedicated podcast host and the feeds the plugins create are dynamic feeds instead of a dedicated .xml file that I place in a directory of my choosing. I also don’t want to use those tools because you can’t customize them and use custom tags or unpopular tags. I got away from Bluebrry’s WordPress plugin early on because they didn’t support Value4Value and there was no way for me to add it to my feed after the fact. I want to be able to use any tag I want without a gatekeeper.
For now, as soon as I figure out what my next podcast will be, I’m going to use Notepad++ and save snippets as separate files that are easier to edit then paste them into the main .xml file. For example, I’ll create a separate file for the <item> block. It will have all the tags I wish to use for that block but with the values empty. All I’ll need to do is fill them in and copy and paste the <item> into my main file. Since the <item> is the thing most added and edited to a feed it shouldn’t be too bad. I can build the rest of the feed first and just add items as I add episodes. It’s not ideal but I think it’s the best option if I want to rely only on myself as much as possible.
Leave a Reply