Use WordPress to podcast

I’m that ancient that I’m not quite sure web pages should have images on them, but if you do want to try this new-fangled (in 2005) podcasting business, it’s pretty simple with WordPress.

Strictly, what a podcast is not is a link to a media file from a web page. Yes, large media websites, eg bbc.co.uk think that’s exactly what it is, but what do they know…

What it should be is a link to a media file contained within a RSS feed - grab, or as we used to say, consume, the feed via an iPod, say, and the mp3 file, say, of the podcast should be downloaded and cued ready for play.

There is some XML trickiness associated with this - because RSS is about the most widely-used form of XML there is - the <enclosure> tag, but WordPress should handle all of this, no problem. The one thing to make sure is that the link to file uses an absolute path, ie http://www.somesite.com/files/media.mp3 and not just files/media.mp3

So to get podcasting with WordPress could not really be simpler. First, make your audio file…. then,

1. Write a post and upload the file using the standard file upload.
2. Insert a link to the file in your post: ie., Send to Editor > Link to File, or a standard hyperlink from another site,
3. (Obviously) Make sure there is a link on the page to your RSS feed - via autodiscovery in the head of the web page, so that the little RSS icon appears in the browser address bar, or on the page itself (Feedburner can see to this for you)

And that’s it - next post, some more complicated stuff involving javascript to add a Podcast quicktag to the post editor - if this post did help you out at all, please give us a link from your WordPress blog…