After the podcast is made…

Published by in podcasting on March 8th, 2007

Creating an audio-only podcast with Audacity or Garageband is a fairly straightforward process, and one of my favorite things to teach teachers how to do in workshops. What comes NEXT in the process of publishing a podcast is usually much more complicated, however.

explaining podcasting

To address those issues, I created a 10 step guide this week I titled “I’ve Made a Podcast! Now What?” It’s available as a PDF download from my Intermediate Podcasting workshop wiki page.

Besides uploading your podcast to a server with ftp or a browser-based interface, creating the web feed for your podcast is often pretty complicated. Using a blogger site or podchains remain my top recommendations for people not already using a wordpress blog, but even those options require multiple steps. On the handout I created a table showing different hosting options for podcasts, including LibSyn and Podomatic which create the RSS feed for you. Using sites like those is a GREAT idea, especially for people just getting started with podcasting and not wanting to mess with RSS.

Another option I did not include but learned about today for Windows podcasters is Toolfactory’s Podcasting software. At $100 for a single license it isn’t cheap, but it does promise to handle the RSS feed details… and that is good news. (Thanks to Karen Montgomery for that tip!)

If you have or know of good handouts that also address these “after the podcast is made” issues, for both Windows and Macintosh users, I’d love to know about those links. “Easy” is a dangerous word to use with technology, and I don’t ever say the process of publishing a podcast is “easy” unless I’m telling someone about iWeb. My main gripe with iWeb is that it’s client based, so you have to use the same computer to publish all your podcasts– and if something happens to your hard drive or that computer, you’re probably in trouble and are going to have to re-create your podcast site.

Thankfully, resourceful website developers as well as software developers are creating solutions to make the “web feed” issues easier for everyone. My favorite podcast publishing tool remains the podpress plugin for WordPress. Free, flexible, and robust in its features. That’s a combination that is hard to beat.

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3 Comments »
  • http://idea.zanestate.edu todd

    Wesley, I recently wrote a php script that makes publishing a podcast feed pretty easy. All you have to do is tag the mp3 with metadata, upload it to the server, and the script will generate the feed and html page from the mp3′s in a given directory. I originally wrote it for scheduled distribution of files, such as if you already have the files for a weekly podcast (think the 2nd time you offer a course) –you set the start date and update interval and the script will automatically add the next mp3 on the appropriate day. See here and here for details. To publish all files in a directory to a feed, you’d just set the update interval to zero.

  • http://mrwilliams.edublogs.org J.D. Williams

    I’ve also used G-Cast.com to host podcasts. It is also free, and I think it does the RSS for you, but I’ve only linked from my blog to specific files for download or streaming in Media Player.

  • http://mrwilliams.edublogs.org J.D. Williams

    http://www.gcast.com – no hyphen in there.

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