Appcasts on Google

2007-09-27 10:47:09 -08:00

If you publish an appcast, you should also publish a robots.txt file that tells search engines such as Google not index the appcast file. I came to this realization after searching for “appcast editor”: the first four hits, and several of the others, are all just appcasts.

There is no point to having these indexed by Google, so save the bandwidth and help people’s search results—tell the search engines not to index them.

And I never did find an appcast editor. I guess I get to write it by hand in vim. (There’s one in MacCode, but it’s not working yet.)

UPDATE: I knew there was an appcast editor out there! It’s Feeder, by Reinvented Software. Thanks to Andy Kim for pointing it out in the comments.

4 Responses to “Appcasts on Google”

  1. Andy Kim Says:

    Vim is a solid choice for any kind of text editing, but there is also Feeder, which I hear some developers use to do their appcasts. The author of the app himself uses it to do his own appcasts.

  2. Grayson Says:

    I wrote a quick and dirty command-line tool that I use in my distribution scripts. If you’re interested in it, I’d be happy to share. If you wanted a GUI editor, it could easily be wrapped or have the relevant code taken out.

  3. Peter Hosey Says:

    Andy: Ah, I knew there was an app to do that! Thanks.

    Grayson: I was looking for a GUI app (specifically, Feeder), but sure, I’m curious. Plus it could save me $30 on Feeder, and I’m cheap. ☺

  4. Grayson Says:

    My code is the least possible thing that could suit my purposes (and, thus, fairly ugly). So far, I’ve always used it in a script so it probably isn’t very useful when using it directly. Also, stuff for From Concentrate Software is hardcoded. All of this can, of course, be abstracted away and improved. I just got it to where I needed it and left it alone. If it’s useful, I’ll go back and work on it a bit more. The single source code file is located here:

    http://fromconcentratesoftware.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/AppcastUpdater/AppcastUpdater.m


    You can also get the project via svn:

    svn checkout http://fromconcentratesoftware.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/AppcastUpdater

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