Seeking practical pointers for newb podcasters

Question

Hey all --
I'd like to hear some simple, practical pointers from those of you who've been doing this awhile -- some of the common sense, time-saving and grief-sparing pointers of your workflow that come only from experience.
As a newb, I'm offering a couple such pointers below, as a result of having just spent maybe 90 minutes trying to figure out what went wrong with the upload to my third episode. It took me 2-3 days to get the initial xml just right, and then for the second I did simply add the new item, and it went up with just a couple of minor fixes and no real frustration.
So I figured all was well. Wouldn't need to validate again. From now on, I thought, I'd just update an item template, paste it in, and go FTP.
Then today, on this basis I uploaded podcast.xml with item #3, and suddenly, zilch.
Feedvalidator and W3C indicated something about the UTF-8 first line and high-bit characters (probably curlies). That didn't make sense to me, because the top part of the channel had been fine for two episodes so far; I hadn't made any changes to those opening lines. Growing more desperate, I even copied that very line directly from Apple's own Tech Specs document, to make SURE I had it precisely correct. No change. Exasperating.
Suffice it to say that I didn't get any more work done this afternoon. I did some more googline and foruming, none of which would quite answer the question.
It was just a question of trying this and that, going back and forth between, I think, eventually six different versions of the xml, getting one bit fixed only to find something else wrong -- like whack-a-mole.
In hindsight it SEEMS that the validators found something else somewhere and for whatever reason unknown to me, they both cited the UTF-8 bit. (If anyone cares to try figuring it out, I can probably go back to upload of those alternative xml's that had the problem; just let me know.)
Yeah, there's a lot to be said for learning by doing, but the things I was saying wouldn't be allowed in the Forum here
So the pointers I'm offering:
(1) It makes sense always, always, ALWAYS to validate xml before uploading -- I'm not going to take anything for granted. And even then,
(2) to prevent overwriting a nice clean xml, I plan to rename the existing, working xml each time before uploading the new one. Only once the new one has shown up properly in iTunes will I remove the previous version. Likewise, I'll keep that short-term archive on my local drive as well for reference, for at least a couple of further uploads.
I'm sure this seems like "DUH" stuff to those of you who've been at it awhile -- it's on the level of "save your work every five minutes" and "make backups" -- but in that context, would any of you care to share equally simple "obvious" tips that may in fact HELP others?
Thanks,
chuck bryant
<Edited by Moderator>

Answer 1

I don't muck around writing my own XML file: I use Podcast Maker ($30) which does all that for you, posts it to a server or iDisk, and will make an enhanced podcast with illustrations. You just make the mp3 file to start with, feed it into Podcast maker and enter the Description and Summary, and that's it.
One other tip: if you are tempted to submit your feed to Feedburner, don't under any circumstances allow Feedburner to submit to the iTunes Store. Do it directly, submitting your XML file to iTunes. This forum is full of complaints from people who've used Feedburner and found it flaky. It's fine on its own, as a parallel way of subscribing, but not when talking to iTunes.