Several people have been asking me about podcasting and the technical solutions behind DJ Orion’s podcast. There are no hardcore coding mysteries or science fiction involved, so here’s a short tutorial about setting up your own podcast.
I realized there are very few good tutorials about podcasting on the net. Most of them tell how you can record your very first podcast, but I’m assuming you know how to record audio on your computer if you’ve read this far :)
OK, here we go.
1) To run a fully automatic podcast without any coding hassle, you need a service which produces RSS-feed for you. This can be any blogging service or similar. If you aren’t familiar with any of those, just set up a blog at Blogger or WordPress. It doesn’t matter how your blog looks like because we’re not using it for blogging or directing people there. It’s just a source of the RSS-feed of your fine podcast.
2) Now, do one or two new entries to your blog. You can write there anything you wish, something about the episode or the track you’re about to podcast or just leave it empty. Each entry is a new episode on your podcast. The Title of your entry will be the title of your episode. The entry body is the description of your podcast. You can write there anything, but what you absolutely need is content a.k.a. a working link to an audio file, most likely mp3. Just the URL isn’t enough, it has to be linked (you know, in “a href=” style).
3) Well, that’s it. You have a podcast. Wasn’t that hard, right? You can try it out, wait for some time as the rss-feed of your blog has updated and then paste the feed url to (for example) iTunes’ podcast section. The feed reader (such as iTunes in this case) searches for mp3-links from the rss feed and once it finds it, it downloads the content automatically. Magic! ;)
4) Let’s bring this a bit further. Services like iTunes Music Store and several other podcast services assume and require your rss feed is valid and has certain lines of code in it. I promised no coding hassle, so let’s make this one in a very easy way, too. Now you have a blog with a couple of entries with mp3-links included, an automatic rss-feed coming from that blog and you’ve tested that it works. Let’s continue.
5) Make a new account to Feedburner. Feedburner is an awesome service which gives a static address to your feed even though you would change its source at some point. It also helps you to set an image for your podcast, provides tools for telling the world about the new episodes and gives nearly real time information about the subscribers of your cast. It’s pretty easy service to use, browse it through, read the “how-to”s and give it a try.
6) Once you’re ready with your feedburning, you should have an address for your feed which looks something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/Your_Feed_Name. Now put some real content to your podcast and add it to all the possible podcast services and get some subscribers. Remember to add very simple instructions how to subscribe – people don’t know it too well, yet. And as you’ll probably realize, the last part – getting an audience – is the hardest part. There’s no real tutorial for that ;)
7) That’s it. Six easy steps. If you found this tutorial useful, link to it, share it on Facebook or tell your friends. If you have any questions, use the comment form below. And if you feel like it, subscribe to DJ Orion’s podcast.
P.S. Here’s also an old entry about how to make better podcasts.