Podcasting
Work continues on Fairies World and this week I have been getting to grips with podcasting. The idea was to publish audio clips on the Fairies World website and as a RSS feed so that it was available as a podcast. The owners of Fairies World were new to podcasting as was I, but we wanted to give this a go.
Of course, enthusiasm soon got the better of us and before even starting we decided to try our hand at video podcasting rather than just plain old audio podcasting. We had a couple of small movie clips, so the scene was set.
I wanted to keep the admin task of adding new podcastable media to the website simple so decided to set up a podcast category within the Fairies World weblog. The next stage was to upload the relevant media file to that weblog entry and install a plugin or two that would apply the relevant enclosures to the RSS feed. This was relatively easy thanks to the PodPress plugin for WordPress. However, I had all kinds of problems getting the embedded media players to work from this plugin so in the end decided the best plan of action was to upload two files for each media clip. One in mp4 format that would be included in the RSS feed and was compatible with Apple iTunes and one in flv format that was embedded into the webpage and available for online streaming. This made the admin a little more complex than intended but it does make the clips available both on the website and via a podcast.It all seems to be working OK now and I of course enjoyed the challenge of learning a new technique. Once you know what a podcast is and how they work then it is quite simple really. You can use this link to view the podcast with iTunes or you can subscribe to the podcast using your preferred podcast program by copying this link into your podcast program. The weblog with the streaming flash movies can be seen here.
