How do I figure out my iTunes Podcast URL?

This is a common puzzle with slickly designed interfaces, actually: the software does such a good job of seamlessly interfacing with specific helper apps that you can't ever seem to intercept the information you want. I find the same problem trying to find a link to point people to the "review this book" link on Amazon.com, for example.

In your case, the email that you can send someone to invite them to subscribe to your podcast looks like this:

If you click on the button "iTunes" in the middle of the image, you do invoke a URL that's fed to your Web browser, but if you have iTunes installed, it's already tweaked your browser to hand that URL to the iTunes program itself. This all happens in under a second, and the end result is that you click on the link in your email and the next thing you see is iTunes showing the page about your podcast:

My first inclination is to "view source" on the email, but that's pretty confusing because of the encoding. Here's what I see (a snippet, at least):

As you can see, the URL has something to do with phobos.apple.com (Phobos is a moon of Mars, btw, in case you're thinking the word is familiar) but the URL is broken by the email encoding so it's pretty confusing to figure out exactly what's what.

Instead, a trick: in your email program, simply roll your cursor over the "iTunes" button and look on the lower right corner for a preview display of the URL that you'd visit:

Now you can see the proper link! It's:

    http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=262964086

That's the link you should use to have a "subscribe via iTunes" link on your page! Here's how that might work: subscribe to Startup Story Radio via iTunes.