Weblogs have given the internet community at large the ability to subscribe to one anothers RSS feeds and receive up to the minute information as and when it happens. This is also now true of Podcasting, thanks to the brilliant minds of Dave Winer and Adam Curry, the Pod Fathers of Podcasting.
A neat utility to enable you to do this is iPodder available for both Mac and PC or iPodderX which is OS X only. Personally I prefer the latter as this gives you the ability to be able to subscribe to your favourite feeds as and when you want them and more importantly they are Free. There are more feature rich News Aggregators like NetNewsWire for Mac and SharpReader for PC as well as a host of others.
In the following example we will go through the simplicity of subscribing to a Podcast using iPodderX.
Step 1: Once we have downloaded iPodderX from the website, we simply open it up and under the Podcasts menu click on Add a Podcast.
Step 2: We now have a pop up window giving us four options. The first is the Podcast Feed URL in which we enter the RSS url for your chosen site. This is usually visible on the main page of the site you are subscribing to. An example of this is typically "RSS 2.0 Feed" or "XML Feed" depending on the type of Weblog.
Step 3: The First Check Behaviour field allows us to either download all files, in this case 3 at a time, or just the latest one. I normally ask to download all files, but the choice is yours.
Step 4: The next two options can be overlooked and are not really necessary although again are self explanatory.
Step 5: Once these fields are complete then click "Add Feed" and you will now see your weblog in the top lefthand side Podcast menu.
Step 6: Now all you have to do is select the Podcast and click Check Podcasts/Feeds in the bottom righthand side of iPodderX and this should automatically download the latest feeds.
Step 7: If you are using iTunes then in the preferences menu you can tell iPodderX to automatically download any feeds into your library. A number of other useful functions like exporting to OPML and Auto Checking are also available.
So there you have it a basic overview of downloading Podcasts onto you computer using free and simply tools. If you found this tutorial useful and have any suggestions and other useful utilities, please don't hesitate to contact me and hopefully I can incorporate them within these pages.
