Podcasting With Wordpress
I don’t know if I’m quite ready to do a podcast on any of my sites yet, but I’ve been curious lately what it would take to make it happen. Yes, I know the first half is to get audio in a good format for the web. The zoom H4 records to wav or mp3 directly so that should be okay. I mean after all I would probably want to do as little editing as possible. But, say I’ve got my audio file, then what? Well, I looked into some of the possibilities and it looks promising.
The main plugin I’ve looked at is podpress from MightySeek. It’s a wordpress plugin that gives you almost everything you really would want to control. You can have it submit your feed to itunes/yahoo/mightyseek as well as tag it based on the mp3 id tags. The plugin is easy to install. Configuration is relatively simple. You just have to tell it what directory your content will be in.
Now, with regards to content…. Podpress doesn’t upload things for you. It’s up to you to upload either manually via ftp, or via wordpress’ upload capability (or a third party upload plugin.) Once you get it there you need to tell podpress the name of the file, the pretty name you want to give it, then it should be able to show you details on the file such as duration, etc.
You can control where the player shows up in the posts. (Yes, there’s a flash based player.) Here’s another really nice feature, it supports more than just audio. It has pretty good media support… MP3, OGG, MP4, MOV, FLV, SWF, ASF, WMV, AVI, YouTube and can have the inline player, or popup style.
All of this and stats too, this can keep track of stats on your feed as well.
Like I said at the start, I’m not quite sure I’m ready to podcast yet, but… it certainly looks like podpress will make it easy to get a podcast going on your wordpress blog.
