How to Subscribe to a Podcast
Subscribing to a podcast means that your program of choice will automatically download shows when they become available. This means no more having to check a website for an update.
Subscribe Using iTunes
iTunes makes it exceptionally easy to subscribe to a podcast, which is probably the reason for its success. A button like the one to the left is usually made available. Click on it. iTunes will open up and load the show's information, offering a display like this:
Click on the small SUBSCRIBE button. That's it!
Subscribe Using Juice
My podcastcher of choice is Juice, although it does take slightly more effort to subscribe. Juice can be found at juicereceiver.sourceforge.net, is free, and runs on the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms. The instructions below are for Windows, but the same procedure should work for other platforms.
There is normally a little button that says "RSS"or "XML" or "Podcast." Click on this button.
This will take you to another Web page (sometimes you will get a page of code, which is fine). The location you have gone to is the podcast's "feed address" - in this case it is http://oneminutehowto.com/OneMinuteHowTo.asp. Select the address in the address bar and copy it into the clipboard (Ctrl-C).
Next,
open Juice. Click on the "Subscriptions" tab.
This is where all of your subscriptions are located (obviously).
To
add a subscription click the green button with the plus sign.
This
will bring up a window with a text box titled "URL". Click within
this box and paste (Ctrl-V) the feed address you saved in the clipboard.
Click the Save button.
The program will then use that feed address to gather information about the podcast. You will see that the name in the Subscriptions window will change to "One Minute How-To," and in the window below that all of the available shows will be displayed. The most recent show may or may not have a checkmark. A checkmark means that the show is set to be downloaded the next time you ask for this to be done. You can check as many shows as you want to download.
Clicking
on a podcast will display all of the available shows for that podcast.
Any shows with green circles that have a triangle within 
,
instead of a check box, have already been downloaded.
You
can download all scheduled shows by clicking the green box with the two
arrows pointing to one another. Since podcasts are in the 5-50 Meg range
in size, this can take a while. Before you do this, however, there are
two things that will be helpful for you.
The
first is to choose the location for the downloaded files. To tell the program
where to put the files go to File -> Preferences.
Within this window, in the General tab, is the field, "Download podcasts into this folder." Browse to the location convenient to you and select it. Each podcast will then be downloaded into its own directory within your specified location. For instance, the above podcast will be placed into an "One Minute How-To" folder.
There are a lot of other choices you can make within the Preferences tab, but you can consider them later.
The other thing to do is to schedule the downloads. You don't have to do this, but it sure makes things convenient. Go to Tools -> Scheduler. Make sure that the "Enable scheduler" box is checked, make sure the "Check at specific times" radio button is selected, and check the box next to the first time (which in my case is 4:00). Click Save.
What you have done is to schedule the program to wake up at 4:00am, go through all of your subscriptions to see if there are any new shows, then download the new ones it finds. When you wake up in the morning you can look at the Downloads tab to see what had downloaded overnight.
It doesn't get much more convenient than that (by the way, when you delete entries in the Downloads window, it only removes the listing from that window, it does not delete the file from your computer).
So now that you have downloaded a bunch of One Minute How-To shows you can move them to your mp3 player and/or burn them to a CD (I do both with my subscriptions). As long as you have Juice running (clicking the "X" doesn't actually end the program, it puts it into your system tray), you will download a new show every time it becomes available.