How to set up a podcast feed for your sermons

Every Hubb site automatically publishes its recordings as an RSS feed, which is what podcast apps subscribe to. Customising it lets your sermons appear properly in Apple Podcasts and Spotify, with your own title, description and artwork.

Creating a customised feed

1. Log in to your web office and open the ‘Settings’ area.
2. From the left-hand navigation choose ‘APIs’, then open the Media XML tab.
3. Select the ‘Add a new media feed’ task at the bottom of the page.
4. In the feed’s properties, choose ‘Format 5 - iTunes Podcast’ from the ‘XML Format’ dropdown for a feed that podcast apps understand.
5. Set the ‘Feed root group’ to the folder whose media should appear in the feed. To include everything on the site, leave the root selected and tick ‘Include media subfolders’ and ‘Include subgroups’.
6. Fill in the RSS fields (title and description) and the iTunes fields: subtitle, author, category, image and the explicit marker. Podcast artwork should be a square image between 1,400 by 1,400 and 3,000 by 3,000 pixels.
7. Choose which media types to include; with the iTunes format selected, only compatible types are offered, so ‘all’ is usually fine. You can also limit the feed by tags, set an item limit (0 means unlimited) and a maximum folder depth, and choose the ordering.
8. Click ‘Save’. Your feed’s address shows as the clickable ‘Feed URL’ on its details.
9. To make this the feed your whole site uses, pick it in the ‘The site’s main RSS feed uses:’ dropdown on the Media XML page and save. The feed stays at the same address (/Media/rss.xml), so existing subscribers aren’t affected.

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Good to know

• The feed itself needs no upkeep: publish a recording and it appears for subscribers automatically.
• Submitting the feed to Apple Podcasts or Spotify is done on their sites with the feed URL; their help pages walk through it.
• Hiding or removing an old show from Apple’s catalogue is also handled through Apple’s own podcast tools rather than in Hubb.
• A feed can also be permanently redirected to a different URL using its ‘Redirect’ setting, useful if your podcast ever moves to another host.