The beginning of something is always an exciting time, isn’t it?
Whether it’s a relationship, a new job, a product or a whole business; that start, that beginning is a great thing.
So - when something doesn’t quite go to plan, it can affect that spike of happiness and you can feel a little deflated.
That’s why, when a client gets in touch with us, asking this specific question ‘Where is my podcast?’ - we go cold, because we know that it’s taken the shine of what should have been an exciting day.
With that in mind, then, we thought that we would talk about the journey of a podcast episode. From us to the world - or wherever you’re putting it out to.
A starring role in our story is something called the RSS Feed. Now, we could get *really* technical with all of this - but we're going try and stop it from getting too bogged down in jargon.
The RSS feed is, essentially, the web address of your podcast.
There are millions of them out there, and they can only be accessed by a certain app, or piece of technology.
Now, when your podcast gets published, from whichever hosting site you use, what the site does is update the RSS feed with the latest episode.
Anything after this is pretty much out of our control. Believe us, it’s just as frustrating for us as it is for you.
The frustration lies in something called the RSS Crawl.
This is a process that the podcasting platforms - like Apple, Spotify, Google etc - go through. They’re looking at all of the RSS feeds in the world that are registered with them, just to see if there’s anything new to tell everyone about.
These RSS Crawls are a bit of a mystery. Obviously, it’s a constant process which is happening automatically - but what no-one can tell you is WHEN it’s going to happen.
That’s why, generally, we schedule podcast episodes to be published just after midnight on the requested day.
That means that, 99.9% of the time, an RSS Crawl will have happened by the time people get out of bed.
That also means that, if a change is made to an episode of your podcast, we say that it could take up to 24 hours for it to be seen on the podcasting platform - because we DO know that the RSS Crawl happens daily - we just don’t know exactly when.
Of course, like so many things in life - children, dogs, significant others - the RSS Crawl doesn't always work like it's supposed to and you jump out of bed - only to find that your latest episode isn't out, or doesn't look like you think it should.
And that's where MonkeyPants Productions comes in. The first thing we do is check the hosting site; mainly because that there is a chance that the error is ours. Once we've crossed that option off the list, we check that there's nothing wrong with the hosting site, or account (have the bills been paid, are the site's servers experiencing downtime?) and then - and only then - do we look at the publishing platform.
Thankfully, problems are pretty rare - but they do occur. Obviously, we look to get them sorted as soon as is humanly possible - but most of the time it's that dastardly RSS Crawl that's to blame.