Subscribing to Your First Podcast in Juice

A number of podcast indices list popular podcasts, and most podcatchers come with a list of shows, but let's imagine that those don't exist and look at how to find a podcast on a site you're visiting. Some of the best programs you can find are ones you stumble across when reading, whether it's discovering the Nature podcast published by the eponymous British journal of science or a quirky individual podcast like Dave Slusher's Evil Genius Chronicles.

Finding the feed for a podcast when visiting a Web site can be difficult, because there is no standard way of announcing that a feed is available. Some sites deliver podcasts as part of their regular blog feed while others have dedicated podcast feeds. These services may be represented by an orange "RSS" tag, the closest thing to a standard user interface for subscribing to RSS feeds, but others may have a button or text link that says "podcast" or "Subscribe." As you can see in Figure below, the Evil Genius Chronicles site has several different ways of subscribing, as well as links to individual shows in the text of Dave Slusher's blog. It demonstrates in how many different locations you may find a feed or links to individual shows.


Podcast feeds are often displayed in several places on a site, and sometimes it's hard to distinguish those feeds from regular RSS and links to individual programs.

Slusher's RSS feed, which is linked to the orange XML button at the upper left of the page, includes his podcasts and written blog postings. If you want only his programs, that link is beneath the XML button, indicated by the Podcast button. But wait, there's another Podcast button immediately below that, which provides an additional feed in case the others fail. That's overkill, but in a technological world one must expect to experience some failures. You need only subscribe to one of those feeds. If you subscribe to more, your podcatcher downloads multiple copies of each show.

As explained previously, your podcatcher can be configured to add subscriptions automatically, but not all feeds should be handled this way, because text and audio RSS files may need to be passed to different applications. We subscribe manually to his feed following these steps:

1 - Right-click the orange XML button to open the pop-up menu for your browser to copy the URI of the podcast feed. If you are using Firefox, select the Copy Link Location command in the pop-up menu as shown in Figure below; if you are using Internet Explorer, select the Copy Shortcut command.


Copy the location of the RSS feed.

2 - Now open Juice and click the Add new feed button, the green circle with a white plus sign in the center. A dialog box titled Add a Feed opens, as shown in Figure 3.11. Paste the URI you just copied into the URL field in the General tab of the dialog box. You don't need to add a title; Juice picks up the name of the show from the feed and fills in the Title field.


Subscribe to a podcast in Juice; just paste the feed address into the URL field.

3 - Don't close the Add a Feed dialog box. Click the Cleanup tab, where you can configure Juice to delete shows that are older than a number of days you choose. For purposes of this explanation, we're checking the box here to enable deleting of episodes older than 14 days, as shown in Figure below. This prevents your podcatcher from filling your hard drive with podcasts, not to mention that it puts pressure on you to listen to shows before they are tossed out. Some shows may be worth saving longer. Click the Save button.


Check the cleanup preferences for each podcast. Some you'll want to keep longer than others.

4 - Juice immediately checks the RSS feed for programs that are available; it doesn't begin downloading old shows. Click the name of the feed in the main window of Juice to see a list of shows that can be downloaded. Congratulations, you've subscribed to your first podcast.

5 - Don't be satisfied with titles alone when you are deciding what to listen to for the first time. Podcasters usually include show notes that describe the guests, the topics discussed, and any music that may be included. This is passed along as part of the RSS feed, in metadata that can be viewed by clicking the title in Juice, as shown in Figure below.


To get more information about a particular show, click the title and select Show Notes to see what the producer has to say about who's on or what music is playing.

When you find what you want, click the green arrow beside title or click the tile and select the "Play episode in…" option. Juice passes the file, in this case to Windows Media Player, and it begins to play.