TWiT to Wit

There's a huge demand for TWiT podcasts as soon as they come out, and Leo Laporte does not have the resources to colocate all his domains across multiple, redundant, fail-safe servers in datacenters around the country.

So when demand goes up (way, way up), twit.tv goes down. Ditto thisweekintech.com. Ditto leoville.com. Ditto everything else Leo does for a living.

So yesterday, TWiT #36 hit the server. And the server promptly disappeared into that special place on the Internet where really important e-mails and Tripod.com websites go.

But here's the thing. Leo's not stupid. He's taken precautions to allow people to still get his podcasts. One of them, I imagine, is iTunes.

iTunes can go to hell.

Another is that he doesn't put the TWiT podcast on his own server. He has a deal where he gives it to AOL and AOL hosts it. AOL does not have Leo's availability problems.

So now that twit.tv is back up — sort of — I can get the AOL URL:

http://aolradio.podcast.aol.com/twit/TWiT0036.mp3

TWiTcasts have a fairly deterministic numbering pattern, and I'm pretty sure that Leo's Ogg Vorbis torrent RSS feed will tell me when to check.

Of course, I'll have to do this manually, but as long as I know where I can find it, I should be set. I prefer Oggs, of course, but a fast MP3 beats a slow Ogg any day.