Using FeedStation 1.6 with NewsGator Online
If you’re a NewsGator Online user, you may have noticed this innocent looking folder hanging out under your clippings:
This new “My Podcasts” folder is where you store podcasts you want to listen to. Getting podcasts into this folder is easy – just click the new “Add to Podcasts” icon that appears below any item that contains an enclosure, like the one shown below:
Starting with the new beta, FeedStation will (optionally) poll your My Podcasts folder for new podcasts and automatically download them to your iPod or Windows Media Player device. Geek that I am, I love the idea that you can add to My Podcasts on one computer and have FeedStation on another computer, copying stuff to your iPod for you.
If you’re new to FeedStation – or the whole podcasting thing in general – you’d probably like a little help getting started. The first thing you’ll need is a set of feeds that contain podcast enclosures. If you’re logged into NewsGator Online, just click the link below to import an OPML file containing several podcast feeds:
http://www.bradsoft.com/feeds/opml/Podcasters.opml
The first time you run FeedStation after downloading it, it will ask for your NewsGator Online user name and password and automatically enable the My Podcasts integration for you. However, you’ll need to let FeedStation know which media player you want the podcasts copied to – to do this, select Tools > Options, then switch to the Podcasts tab. This page on my site provides the rest of the details.
Using FeedStation 1.6 with FeedDemon
If you’re a FeedDemon user, upgrading the bundled copy of FeedStation to the new beta version is easy – just download and install it, and it will replace your existing version. Although you can click “Skip” on the welcome screen to use FeedStation without a NewsGator Online account, you’ll obviously need an account if you want to try the My Podcasts integration.
Giving Due Credit
For almost a decade now I’ve been used to announcing things that I created by myself, but this time I’m announcing something that involved several of my NewsGator co-workers. So I’d like to acknowledge the late nights of development work by Darryl Dreiling and Doug Furcht, QA work by Katriana Hutchison and Ria Kaur, and oversight by Ed Jukkola that was required to make this happen. Nice job, folks :)
Update: Here’s Greg Reinacker’s post about the new FeedStation.