Podcast Help

What is podcasting?

It's a way to get audio and video files over the Internet through special web pages designed to maintain a list of available items and promote new content. These special syndication lists are called RSS Feeds and will usually be identified by an orange XML or RSS icon for lists of web pages, or a similar icon with podcast added to it for lists of audio and video files. For more on these RSS syndication lists, see our RSS Help page. You may listen or view these files on your desktop, or download them onto a mobile device like an iPod or other portable player.

All podcasts at CDC are free.

How do I start?

All you need is to download and install appropriate software like iTunes, iPodder, Juice, or a number of others available on the Internet, that will subscribe to the podcast list and stay updated, show you available content and even automaticall retrieve the most recent files. These programs can also play the file on your computer.

How do I subscribe to CDC podcasts?

Simple. For CDC podcasts, click the subscribe link by the item you are interested in and you will be taken to a page that has convenient buttons to add this subscription to your software. This page will also show you the web address of the list page (RSS Feed) that you may copy and paste into the appropriate place in your software to manually subscribe.

Sometimes I see a lot of strange code when I click an RSS link. What is that?

The actual web page for the RSS Feed is really special code for programs used for subscribing to podcasts. Web browsers do not like it and just show you the code. When that happens, you can copy the address from the address bar in your browser and paste it into the appropriate place in your software to manually subscribe.