I hadn't published a podcast since 2005, back when podcasting meant "automating downloads of audio files to an iPod because there's no internet connection when you're mobile" and not "any kind of media, and nobody even remembers what an iPod is anymore, and why on earth wouldn't you have an internet connection all the time?"
Anyway. I'd assumed the passing decade would have meant audio production tools and podcast publication tools would have matured significantly since the good old days. Nope. Audio editing still basically sucks. Audacity works, but is destructive and fussy and a pain sometimes. GarageBand is so horribly designed for actually editing audio that it's worse than Audacity. There are other editing tools, but they all seem to suck in various ways. Where's the simple, non-destructive, easy audio editing tool that lets you remove noise and make the audio sound good? iMovie does it well for video. Where's the audio version of that? I want my hovercraft.
For publishing the podcast itself. Holy. There's third-party solutions like Libsyn etc. but they require you keep your eggs in their basket. I'm not about to do that - I learned that lesson long ago. For self-hosted podcast publishing, it looks like PodLove for WordPress is about it. It's close, but requires you to have FTP access to a directory, so I can't run it on UCalgaryBlogs. So. I'm self-hosting my podcast here on my own blog. It works.
Then, there's submitting it to the iTunes podcast directory, so people can find it. There's a validator, but it was barfing on my feed. It complained that my server couldn't handle "HEAD requests", which, of course, it can. So I figured one of my caching or security plugins was helpfully blocking the byte requests. Yup. Disabled WordFence, and the iTunes podcast feed validator worked. I'm a bit nervous about having to turn off WordFence, though…
It's been awhile. Nothing much has changed. Weird.