Quick Tip: How to Do a Podcast From WordPress

This WordPress tutorial will give you all the guidance you would need in order to transmit podcasts successfully from your WordPress blog whenever you want.

Podcasting is basically the distribution of video or audio content through Atom or RSS 2.0. Podcasts can be purchased and the biggest podcast clients of the day include iTunes, Juice and CastPodder for Linux. These mediums let the people who are listening have subscriptions to your podcast, whose feed would reach them via RSS or Atom. Because of these programs, listeners can easily download your podcasts to their audio players like iPods the moment they become available for download.

How Podcasts Work

1. First, create the media file you want to podcast, which can be either visual or audio podcast. This is usually done in an Mp3 or Mp4 format.
2. Upload your selected file to the server.
3. Create a link to your file through a post on your blog.
4. After this is done, WordPress would automatically provide a link for your RSS/Atom feed podcast.
5. Let listeners subscribe to your podcasts. They can do this by posting applications for clients on their RSS/Atom feeds. This also allows them to download fresh files automatically as well.

Whenever you need perfect connectivity, WordPress is able to create any and all of the links required for your podcast.

How to Use WordPress for Podcasting

WordPress, especially in its latest edition makes podcasting a breeze with uninterrupted support. To send podcasts through WordPress, you would need to add an audio file in the post. It will then automatically create enclosure tags to your RSS2/Atom feeds so that it can become instantly usable as a podcast in its own right.

It is important to remember to use complete and absolute URLS when linking your audio files.

Negligence in this step will lead to WordPress’ inability to form an enclosure link for your file.

An example of this is:

Wrong: <a href="my-podcast.mp3">My podcast</a>

Right: <a href="http://example.com/my-podcast.mp3">My podcast</a>

If you want the syndication of your podcast to occur or create subscriptions to it, simply add the link for your RSS link and to other accounts that require syndication like iTunes.

An example of this would be:

http://example.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2

Similarly, if you were utilizing a feed coming from Atom, then you would need to add a link like the following example:

http://example.com/wordpress/?feed=atom

iTunes has a slightly different method of accessibility towards podcasts. Take special consideration when linking your podcast feed to the itpc:// protocol instead of the widely accepted https://. An example of this is:

itpc://domain.org/path/?feed=atom

Important Things to Remember When Putting Up a Podcast on WordPress

1. WordPress podcasts work only for posts, not for pages that are static.
2. You have to make the file you linked accessible upon posting otherwise WordPress would be unable to extract the information that it requires from the linked files.
3. When you make any changes to a file, you have to republish the entire post. This is necessary in order to let WordPress automatically update the information about the file based on its size.
4. You might have to put .xml at times at the end of the RSS/Atom URL so that it can work properly.
5. To make sure that WordPress recognizes m4a and m4b files as podcasts you have to take the following steps:
   • Ensure that the server for your web has the configuration for their service
   • Make sure that what they serve has the correct content-type
   • You can make sure of this through including the directives given in the box below to your Apache configuration file.
   • AddType audio/x-m4a .m4a
   • AddType audio/x-m4b .m4

These steps will help you get your podcasts up and running successfully on your blog in no time.