I’ve refined my original method for making “Podcasts”, that is, the audio version of these posts, available to you.
Thanks to a nice feature in WordPress 1.5 the most annoying part of creating Podcasts has been made virtually invisible.
My basic method is this:
- Record Audio using iMovie
- Export Movie as a WAV file
- Import WAV file into iTunes and Convert to MP3
- Upload MP3 to blog.
Now this is where the method changes… instead of using a seperate XML/RSS creation tool to actually create the podcast feed you can do this, if you’re using WordPress 1.5:
- When you’re creating the associated post in WordPress… include a valid, absolute, link to your MP3 file. The link *must* be absolute, not relative… meaning the “href” attribute must include the entire address to your file including the http://www.yoursite…. etc.
I was doing this anyway by including the “Audio Podcast Available” link at the beginning of any posts that had a podcast. However, I was using a relative, rather than absolute URL for that link… so WordPress didn’t notice it. I realised my error when I was trying to validate my RSS feed.
Once WordPress notices the valid link to your MP3 file, it automatically includes an “enclosure” tag when it generates the RSS for your new post… thus creating your valid podcast feed for you! After you publish your article, if you go back and edit your post in WordPress, you’ll see the enclosure tag that it added.
What’s more, when I went back and corrected the links to my podcasts in my previous posts, WordPress automatically created the enclosures and those old posts suddenly became available to all my current RSS viewers!
Wow! 🙂
So… now, the procedure for creating a Podcast of your blog, using WordPress, iMovie, and iTunes goes like this:
- Record the Audio using iMovie
- Export the Movie as a WAV file
- Import the WAV file into iTunes and Convert to MP3
- Upload the MP3 to your blog.
- Include a full, absolute, link to the MP3 in your related blog post.
- Publish!