How To Build A Podcasting Site On WordPress

Posted on November 15, 2007
Filed Under WordPress Blogging, WordPress Syndication |

The success of blogging is all about writing and posting. What if you don’t like to write, but good at talking? Then podcasting is a better choice for you. Podcasting is a way of sharing your blog in an audio format, which means you just record your voice on some topic and distribute it from your blog, no writing, just talking and posting. Your WordPress can handle this easily.

Podcasters usually distribute content in RSS format or in Atom format. Podcast clients like iTune, Juice, and CastPodder are able to extract the content from your RSS feeds, download it into an audio player, and help the listeners listen to whatever you have to say. The podcast clients are smart enough to understand the music files as podcast if you provide a special tag “<enclosure>” in the feed. WordPres is very smart too. When WP generates RSS feeds, it adds an <enclosure> tag (available in RSS 2.0) to any music file to make the RSS feed look like:

<enclosure url=”http://your_domain/file_name.file_extension” length=”file_size_in_bytes” type=”mime_type_of_this_file” />

Please note that the <enclosure> tag is a sub-tag of the <item> tag.

Thus, your job is to make a audio post, and WordPress will do the rest for you.

Instead of writing, making a audio post is to record your voice first. That’s easy. There are two A great free software tools yiou can use for sound recording and editing:
- Audacity: http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
- WavePad: http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/.

After recording and saving your voice to mp3 files, you need to update them to the server. Autio files take a lot of storage, but if you use web hosting such as HostMonster, then space is not an issue.

Here’s is the most importent step. While creating a audio post, scroll down to the bottom section and you will find a section named Add custom field. Just add a key named “enclosure” and type the URL of your audio file as the value of that key. For subsequent posts, just select the item key from the custom field key drop-down box, and type the URL of the audio file as its value. Be very careful, you must add a link to the absolute URL (that means the exact URL pointing to that audio file inside your post content. No relative content will work.

After saving the post, if you take a look at your RSS feed, you will find the first item (the post that you just made becomes your top item in RSS feeds) looking like this:

<item>
<title>Sample Podcast</title>
<link>http://localhost/wp/2006/06/27/sample-podcast/</link>
<comments>http://localhost/wp/2006/06/27/sample-podcast/
#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 27 Jun 2006 16:15:27 +0000</pubDate> <dc:creator>admin</dc:creator>
<category>frontpage</category>
<guid isPermaLink=”false”>
http://localhost/wp/2006/06/27/sample-podcast/ </guid>
<description><![CDATA[Lets podcast from wordpress blog. All you
have to do is add a link to your music file. But please be careful,
you must link to the absolute url of that audio file, no relative link will work.
Link to my Podcast
]]>
</description>
<content:encoded>
<![CDATA[<p>Lets podcast from wordpress blog. All you have to do is
add a link to your music file. But please be careful, you must link to the absolute url of that audio file, no relative link will work.</p> <p><a title="My Podcast" href="http://localhost/wp/my-podcast.
mp3">Link to my Podcast</a>
</p>
]]>
</content:encoded>
<wfw:commentRSS>
http://localhost/wp/2006/06/27/sample-podcast/feed/ </wfw:commentRSS>
<enclosure url=’http://localhost/wp/my-podcast.mp3′
length=’1754254′
type=’audio/mpeg’/>
</item>

Please notice the <enclosure> tag in the preceding feed entry. WordPress automatically detects the size of that audio file. So when someone subscribes to
your blog RSS using iTune or any podcast client, this content will be automatically downloaded to his/her audio player for listening to that podcast.

If you want a separate RSS feed just for your podcasts, then it is considered as dedicated podcasting. In this case, you need to create a category like my_podcasts or something meaningful. Now whenever you make a podcast, just post under this special category my_podcasts.

As we know, by default WordPress RSS contains all posts in its feed collection. However, to make a separate RSS feed URL just for this category, we need to browse the feed URL in the following format:

http://your_wordpress_installation/?feed=rss2&category_name=my_podcasts

If you browse this URL, you will find only the latest feeds from the my_podcasts category.

Sounds a little hard? A couple of plug-ins for Podcasting maybe helpful:

- Podpress (http://www.mightyseek.com/podpress) is a cool plug-in that will help you to podcast more smartly. This plug-in has built-in player support, preview support , video podcasting, and much more.

- iPodCatter (http://garrickvanburen.com/wordpress-plugins/wpipodcatter) helps podcasters running WordPress to create a valid feed for iTunes’ podcast
directory and specify the itunes:duration and itunes:explicit tags on a per-episode basis.

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