I'm happy to report that a minor miracle occurred today -- that after something like a month and a half of it being down, I finally figured out how to get the iTunes channel for the CCLaP Podcast up and running again. Well, hallelujah for that! The problem, you see, is that I use the content management system Movable Type (or MT) to maintain this website; and while in general I'm extremely happy with MT, and find it for the most part to be the most powerful and customizable option on the market, it's also true that within MT it's difficult to add the proprietary fields of information Apple requires of an RSS feed, in order to make it iTunes-friendly.

The way I had been doing it this summer was the way described in this excellent tutorial by Adrian Sevitz, now a year and a half old but still working just fine; it basically involves adding two plug-ins to your MT install, one to attach iTunes-friendly enclosures to an entry and the other to add the customized fields needed. At the beginning of this autumn, though, my site host upgraded my MT install here to the latest version, v4, and after re-installing the plug-ins needed I discovered that I could no longer get them to work correctly. And thus has the CCLaP iTunes channel been down since, and with a very frustrated programmer here on this end (er, me) trying in vain to get it fixed.

So what was finally the key? Oh, something extremely stupid on my part, it turns out; that after re-installing the plug-in that will allow me to add custom fields, I kept mistakenly going to the "Plug-Ins" option of my MT interface to try to actually define the new fields. Turns out that the Plug-Ins menu in MT is merely for setting the preferences of the plug-in itself; as you can see in the above screenshot, to actually use the plug-in (that is, to actually create the custom fields needed), you simply go straight to your MT "Preferences" menu, where the custom fields are simply one more submenu item there. Zuh!

Anyway, hope this clears up some confusion for other frustrated MT4 users out there, doing fruitless Google searches on how to get their Movable Type installation to create an iTunes-friendly podcast feed; like I said, the insanely detailed tutorial linked to above still works just fine for MT4, as long as you install the latest versions of the plug-ins and look in the right menus of your interface afterwards. I hope you'll have the chance to become a regular listener to the podcast again or perhaps a new listener for the first time, either through its iTunes channel, standalone RSS feed, or web-based streaming versions.

And speaking of which, I guess I can announce at this point that the subject of the next episode, whose interview is getting posted this coming Monday, is none other than Jesse Thorn, host of the Public Radio International show The Sound of Young America; we recently had the chance to talk for over 90 minutes during a visit to Chicago he made a few weeks ago, meaning that this will once again be a two-part episode (since my podcast-creation software here at home, Apple's GarageBand, starts malfunctioning once episodes get over an hour or so in length). Anyway, hope you'll get a chance to listen to part 1 of the interview, coming here Monday.