First, I had trouble of getting my installer to recognize my internal hard-drive. After a bit of struggling, I found a post in the Apple Discussion Forum that advised people to wait about 5 minutes or so to get the installer to recognize the hard-drive. And so it did and I was able to get the installation started.

Once the installation was over and rebooted, the computer was stuck in the so called “Blue Screen of Death” for Mac. I forcefully rebooted the machine several times, hoping it will generate the 1.21 Gigawatts of electricity to power up my Leopard but with no luck. Later found out that it was a stupid move that could have fried my hard-drive. And of course, I didn’t have any backup.

After reading through a long thread of posts again in the Apple Discussion Forum, found out that the problem was due to the incompatibility of Application Enhancer (APE) on Leopard and in order to fix the problem I had to either restart the installation process or start up as a single-user mode and manually delete the APE. But oddly for me none of the bootup key sequence was working so I couldn’t restart the installation process nor start up as a single-user mode. So I replaced my keyboard with my previous one and voilà. I could login as single-user mode and delete the files and everything worked fine from then on.

If you are experiencing similar problem, check out this article in Apple Support.

One thing he wished he knew though was how to put subchapters into his enhanced podcasts. A subchapter is a chapter that has just a link or an image but no title. With subchapters you can have loads of images and links without every one of them taking a spot in the chapters list in iTunes.

Well, to add a subchapter in Podcast Maker all you have to do is make a chapter with a blank title. It will then show the title of the parent chapter in grayed out text as you can see in the following screenshot:

As you can see in the screenshot, the subchapters have markers that are shorter too.

Some users use this feature to make a “template” for their enhanced podcasts. Although you can still do that, in more recent versions of Podcast Maker you can just copy paste the chapters from older episodes.

One more thing. If you are going to turn your slides into chapter images, bump up the maximum chapter image size in the preferences. The default is the Apple recommended 300×300, but at that size your slides will not be legible.

A click is worth a thousand words.

Click here!

Surprised? I was too when I discovered that iTunes lets you access password protected podcasts.

Oh, by the way, you can use the username guest with the password guest to access that podcast.

Why?

At first, password protecting a podcast might sound counterintuitive, but there are actually many reasons why you might want to do such a thing. You might be a teacher or professor who wants the podcast to be available only to your students. You might want to share the podcast with just your friends. I know some people who share their music this way. You might want to podcast your work to clients so that they are automatically updated as you publish changes. You might have a podcast that you want only your department to have access to. Or you might want to do a “closed beta” of your podcast.

How?

The feed you clicked on is protected through the standard HTTP authentication schemes. iTunes supports both the “basic” and “digest” flavors of HTTP authentication. Combined with SSL this will provide robust security for your podcast.

Basically, you put a .htaccess file into the directory that contains your podcast feed with content that looks like this:

AuthType Digest
AuthName "Potion Factory"
AuthDigestFile /usr/local/apache/conf/digest_passwd
Require valid-user


You also have to use the following shell command to make the digest_password file:

htdigest -c /usr/local/apache/conf/digest_passwd "Potion Factory" user1

I suggest you don’t try this yourself unless you really understand what is written above. There are many reasons why the above will not work. Ask your webmaster to do it for you if you are not comfortable.

If you really want to try, here is a site with more detailed instructions:

Comprehensive guide to .htaccess – Password Protection

Credit goes to Mr. Mark B. Priddy of Affiliated Media Group for letting us know about this iTunes feature. We actually learned something answering a support email!

UPDATE (2/27/2006): You can password protect your podcast easily if you use FeedBurner. FeedBurner has an option to password protect your feed, which does exactly what I describe here. The only downside to the FeedBurner way is that it only allows one username and password, but it is still tremendously useful for something that only takes a few clicks.

Follow these steps to do this in Podcast Maker the Potion Factory way:

1. Select all chapters (Command-A).
2. Copy (Command-C).
3. Paste into a text editor (Command-V).

What you will get is an html table with the timecode, chapter title, and link of your chapters. Delish!

This is the first hint of the day, because I think it really demonstrates how we do things around here. Magical simplicity is a luxury we strive hard to provide you. That is actually the whole concept behind Potion Factory.