Create a Podcast with Excel
In January of 2007 I made the decision to discontinue the production of my music podcast. At first it was an unintentional discontinuation, but turned permanent around June. That’s neither here nor there. The point is, I have 39 episodes of great music that are somewhat timeless, except for the parts where I talk about myself. So I wanted to put up the files so they could be downloaded if someone wanted to listen. The podcast originally used a Wordpress blog to create the RSS feed with enclosures. Since I wasn’t going to be updating the podcast anymore, I didn’t want to waste the time resurrecting the database and blog, so what to do. I thought about writing the RSS feed by hand, but that sounded horrible.
I needed to use some program that I already had to create the RSS feed. The one that immediately came to mind was Excel. A quick Google search later and I had an already built Excel spreadsheet with a VBA macro that created the RSS feed for me, however it didn’t do enclosures. So I modified the macro to include enclosures with the mime type and length. The macro will also allow you to insert new items into the feed. All you have to do is click one button, add your information for the new podcast episode, then click a second button. The feed is automatically updated with the new episode.
The original RSSCreate can be found at Automate Excel.
The modified version for creating podcasts can be found here: podcastcreate.xls
I’ll be adding publish date to the spreadsheet. That should definitely be in there, but is missing right now. The addition of iTunes specific tags is better handled by Feedburner, so those will not make it in to the spreadsheet.
Check out the output of the spreadsheet at http://www.razinggiants.com/feed/feed.xml.
Let me know what you think by leaving a comment or e-mailing podcaststudio@gmail.com.
Peace,
Russ
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For Podcasts, I have found two sites that have royalty free music that is podcast safe.
http://www.studio1productions.com and http://www.studio1downloads.com
I hope this helps other podcasters so they don’t run into trouble with the RIAA.