gdgt

I probably subscribe to over 20 podcasts in the Zune software. I'd say the Zune software handles podcast pretty well, but one thing that sucks is that if you reinstall the Zune software, say after a reformat of Windows (I do this periodically), you have to put all of them back in one by one. Until Microsoft stores your subscriptions "in the cloud", I hope, I have a really simple method to make this less annoying next time you need to reload podcast feeds into Zune, or any podcatcher for that matter. What this method does is combine multiple podcast feeds into one single feed, so instead of adding 20 feeds, I would just need to add 1.

All you need is a Yahoo account (everyone has a spam email, right?) to use their product called Pipes. This basically allows you to do a ton of stuff with feeds, websites, and other data. In this case, you can use it to aggregate multiple podcast RSS feeds into a single feed that you can subscribe to in the Zune software. I created a "Tech" podcast feed that you can check out and copy:

pipes.yahoo.com­/pipes­/pipe.info­?­_id­=82469bef8242b5...

If you click "View Source" you can see in the "Fetch Feed" window where you paste in the podcast feeds you want. I also included a filter so that if you come across feeds that has content that you don't want, such as PDF files or specific shows you don't want popping up, you can use that. If you click "Save a copy", it'll save a version of this pipe to your yahoo account where you can edit and save it.

Once you added the podcasts you like, click "Save" and hit the "Run Pipe" link. It'll show you the output in a new window as well as provide links to the RSS feed. Right click, copy, and add that feed to the Zune software.

What I like to do is categorize my feeds; I have one for Tech, Comedy, Food, Revision3, TWIT etc... I do this because that will be the name that shows up on you Zune when going into that podcast feed and it allows me to know where I can find specific groups of content.

I should note, one of the downsides from doing this is that you lose the podcast art. Other than that, it saves me a ton of time and headache when setting up my podcasts.

Hope that helps at least one person...