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Bandwidth and Feed

2 March 2005 5 Comments

ServerI took a look this afternoon at my storage and bandwidth usage on the TypePad server, a bit concerned by the increasing number of subscribers to The Roadhouse. It’s a good thing I looked. I’m a TypePad Pro subscriber with 200 MB storage and a monthly allocation of 5 GB bandwidth.

Being ever the optimist about the podcast, I’d hoped that it would at least push those limits a bit. Did it ever. As of today – the 2nd day of the month – The Roadhouse has sucked up nearly a full GB of bandwidth. TypePad is kind enough to provide projected bandwidth usage numbers for the month. I’m sitting at 246% projected of the allocated bandwidth for my account. Mississippi Fred McDowell must have known we were coming when he sang, "You got to move."

Luckily, I had a contingency plan that I just hadn’t rolled into place. A good friend from a previous life adventure has been hosting the steidler.net domain and email accounts for the last several months. I sent him an email the week the first podcast went up, asking if he had storage, bandwidth or any other concerns about hosting the podcast as part of the steidler.net domain. He had none. So, as of this evening, the ‘casts are all cozy in a new home on my domain, with bandwidth to burn.

This is where the beauty of RSS feeds really comes in handy. I’ve been hand-rolling the base feed for The Roadhouse, then pushing it through Feedburner. I popped open vi on the desktop at home, edited the current version of the feed to point to steidler.net, and dropped it back on the TypePad server. Just for sanity’s sake, I reburned the feed at Feedburner, too. The move was completely transparent. When I opened iPodder and checked The Roadhouse feed, everything was exactly as it should be, showing the files hosted at steidler.net. I even downloaded the most recent ‘cast without a problem.

So, you shouldn’t notice a change in your podcast client. If you do, feel free to let me know, and I’ll be glad to see what I can do.

5 Comments »

  • Anton said:

    Got a direct link to the mp3s? I;m getting 404s for all the ones linked here.

    - 3 March 2005 at 8:10 pm
  • Tony Steidler-Dennison said:

    Yep. They’re good again. I moved the files into a sub on steidler.net and forgot to change the links on the site.

    - 3 March 2005 at 8:36 pm
  • Anton said:

    Thanks!

    I’ll drop them on my iPod and listen at work today.

    - 4 March 2005 at 7:16 am
  • Gersh said:

    Can you say a bit more about how you did this? I’m getting a typepad account and have some space on an external server. But I’m not sure how to construct the feed so that Podcatching clients can subscribe to receive both the feed for the blog and find the mp3 file (I’m a dummy when it comes to all this stuff).

    Thanks!

    - 13 May 2005 at 11:34 pm
  • Tony Steidler-Dennison said:

    Gersh:

    One of the drawbacks (nearly the only drawback) to the TypePad accounts is that they don’t easily support enclosure tags in the auto-generated feeds. So, I’m pushing a couple of feeds. One feed is the site feed, the other is the enclosure feed.

    Site Feed:
    http://www.roadhousepodcast.com/atom.xml

    Podcast Feed:
    http://feeds.feedburner.com/roadhouse

    For the site feed, I don’t have to take any action – it just gets published automatically. I “hand-roll” the base feed for Feedburner. You can find that feed here:

    http://steidler.net/roadhouse.xml

    The elements of this feed are pretty easy to understand, really, if you look closely at its contents. And, it serves as the base feed for the feedburner tool.

    Anyway, I manually add the new entry at the top of this file, then push it to the steidler.net server. I then point the feedburner web interface to the file on the steidler.net site and reburn the feedburner feed.

    Yep—it’s a less-than-optimal process but, until TypePad integrates enclosure tag capabilities into their product, I’ll stay with it.

    Don’t know if that was helpful or not …

    - 16 May 2005 at 8:52 am