s on adding these type of media to your posts, how to manage the files and the best available plugins to extend WordPress so it can serve up your shiny new content to your readers / viewers or even listeners.
In the first part of this series I would like to look at how to add a podcast to your blog.
In the truest sense of the form, a podcast is an audio file available to download and be played in an audio player such as an iPod. The podcast will be a series of audio files which can be subscribed to using an aggregator. The aggregator will then download each new episode as it is released and make it available to listen to at a time convenient to the user. For me this means I can subscribe to a pocast in iTunes and upload it to my iPod.
Bloggers may not be creating pure podcasts, perhaps we are doing a one-off audio posts with no series, but the techniques are the same.
I have created a podcast using the techniques I describe to highlight this posts, it is available at the bottom of this post.
Why Podcast Over and Above Writing?
Podcasting is not a replacement for the written blog posts, I think it is a useful addition to your articles. Here are some benefits and pitfalls of podcasting versus writing.
Interviewing people – there is no real replacement for a person to person interview, it has to be audio or video, the nuance of voice is lost when an interview is transcribed to text.
Distributing large amounts of content – if you are delivering a large amount of content, podcasting may be for you, it allows people to get the content for review whilst they are traveling or have it playing in the background when doing other tasks.
If you audience is not online all the time – podcasting is great for an audience which is not listening all of the time, the asynchronous format means you can record and distribute your podcast and your listeners can hear what you have to say at a time convenient to them.
Podcasting takes practices – once you are comfortable with the medium you can rattle off a podcast with a great deal of content very quickly. Writing the same amout of content would take much longer. As you can tell from my podcast, I am not very comfortable with the medium, but that would come with practice.
Podcasting is linear – your reader may not need all of the information you are spouting out, is it not easy to jump to a particular section of a podcast as it is with a written document. Use podcasting where podcasting works use blog posts where thye work best.
A very good example of a podcaster cum blogger is Ozzie blogger Yaro Starak, why not skoot over and check out some of his podcasts. Yaro blogs about blogging and internet marketing, here is one of his podcasts http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/1104/scocco-interview/.
As I have already mentioned, podcasts are available to subscribe to using the RSS format. This functionality is not available out of the box with WordPress so your old WP install needs to be extended, I sense plugins are needed.
Microphone – buy the best one you can it will show in your final production. I use a fairly cheap one and you can hear the hisses and pips as I breath out or speak. Check out podcasting microphones on amazon they are not cheap but if you are serious about podcasting you will need to make that investment at some point.
Recording Software -MAC and PC both come with an audio recording package, as you can expect these are limited. It looks like a lot of people are recommending audacity, an open source recording package available to download for free at http://audacity.sourceforge.net/. This is what I used for the podcast included with this post and I found it easy to use and full of neat little editing tools and effects.
So you have recorded your podcast and converted it to an MP3 format. Now you are ready to upload it to your blog for play back or subscription via an MP3 player.
Streaming MP3 over the net will use up your bandwidth quite quickly if you have a popular site with a limited amount of downloading on your hosting plan.
There is a solution to this problem and that is to host it on a third party server. I have never done this so I cannot recommend any provider over another, but a search for podcast hosting on Google will return quite a few, if any readers of this posts can recommend any podcast hosting providers please leave a comment below with a link – cheers.
Ability to Play from a blog post – I want immediate or downloadable access to my podcast.
To add a podcast to this page, I enclose the URL to my podcast with a tag {podcast}http://podcastURL{/podcast}. If I want to play a remotely hosted MP3 I simply point at the remote file, all of my problems solved.
To subscrive to this podcast or any future podcasts, the plugin has created the appropriate feed at https://ibraininc.com/feed/podcast. At the time of writing this does not work, I will update once I have sorted the problems.
You can see my nice little player at the base of the post with volume controls, play and pause controls – a very nice little plugin.
Podcasting is a great way to build a more personable feel to your blog, it lets your readers hear and get a sense of what you are like. Sometimes our written voice is not the real us, this helps to grow brand-you.
I the next part of this series I will talk about adding video to your blog.
Here I am with my lovely Geordie accent, an English accent which most people outside of the UK never hear, we don’t all talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins you know.
Emily Ever After
Review
Emily Ever After
Ever since childhood, native Californian Emily Hinton longed for the bright life of New York City. The allure of fashion, excitement, and a fast-paced beat compelled her to apply to NYU directly after high school, but when financial matters ended that dream, she settled for nearby San Diego State University. After completing her education, Emily continued to make plans to get out of nondescript, uninteresting Jenks, CA.
Enter the faithful (in every sense of the word) Uncle Matthew, the only Hinton to live in New York, who sets Emily up with an interview at Morrow & Sons. To Emily's ecstasy, she gets hired, finds an apartment to share, and is raring to go "change the world." Little does she realize how great an impact this new world will have on her.
The innocent, worldly, guileless Emily must do her best to get past those emotionally horrendous transitional moments with her bizarre roommate Brittany, who alternates charging Emily the odd penny every other month on expenses; Xavier, Emily's editor boss who dresses in Darth Vader garb and licks peanut butter from the jar with his finger sans spoon; and the other associate editors --- Regina, Lane and Skylar --- with whom Emily has virtually nothing in common except their place of employment.
As Emily finds her feet in the working world of publishing, she begins to relax. Eating out daily is the only feasible practice for a working gal like her, so she is told. Sadly, going out nightly to bars and drinking, sometimes heavily, is also another "expectation" glibly tossed Emily's way through her only friends, her fellow editorial assistants. Desperate to fit in, and realizing her lifelong dream of making a successful transition in the big city, Emily finds herself compromising her Christian faith, in small, seemingly insignificant ways: drinking too much or too often, buying into a have-to-have-it materialistic mentality, getting a little too physical with her new boyfriend, and learning to play political games on the job. All these "little" choices begin to eat away at Emily's once confident, kindly trusting nature.
Over time, it's the subtle love and support from her uncle, also a Christian, and an email friend who Emily knew in grammar school that challenge her to think beyond the "expected," and eventually Emily starts taking sensible proactive steps that define her and her faith. She learns to face up to difficult truths, to take ethical stands, and to confront her own inner fears of being rejected for who she is.
By the book's end, readers will have journeyed with Emily and enjoyed the trip. Peppered with gentle humor and edgy dialogue, the authors excel at getting under the surface and to the heart of Emily's struggles, to all our insecurities. Readers will thoroughly enjoy walking alongside this young adult woman as she learns to accept herself in an unaccepting, unsupportive environment. Emily's takeaway is one worth revisiting whenever the temptation to cave in to another's expectations comes calling.
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Reviewed by Michele Howe on November 13, 2011I'm not sure how the photo relates to the title. I like the idea of the shot. More foliage and avoidance of the photographer in the sunglasses would improve the picture IMO.
The blurry leaves are very distracting...
I think you could have done a lot more with this saying. So much potential, but too much of the face is covered to have a real impact.
not sure I get the reference to the cliche. Is it his sunglasses?
Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri received today at the "Center House" a delegation from the Association of Building Traders in Lebanon, headed by the President of the Association, Elie Soma, in the presence of Hariri's Advisor