With Podcasting becoming more and more popular these days, many people are now asking how to add a podcast to their weblog. Although I am not a Podcaster myself, I am a huge fan and because of the limited resources available on this subject, I decided to create some pages here.
I will assume you are using WordPress (http://wordpress.org/), are familiar with RSS feeds and have already created an MP3 Podcast, if not then you can visit my how to Podcast pages within this site.
In order to add an Audio file to your Weblog and create an RSS feed we need to add an enclosure tag to our posts. An enclosure tag looks like this <enclosure> and consists of three attributes. The "url" attribute which is where the web address of the file containing the mp3 is, the "length" attribute which rather confusingly tells us the size of the file in bytes and finally the "type" attibute which tells us what type of file it is. So a typical example would look something like this: <enclosure url="http://www.your-site.com/yourmp3.mp3" length="123456789" type="audio/mpeg"/>.
Unfortunately we can't just go and type this enclosure tag directly into our posts and so we need to use the enclosure function within WordPress. If you don't have this facility then there is a simple hack available at ipportunities, although I understand that the next version (1.3 beta 4) of WordPress will support enclosures which is great.
So without further a do let us begin:
Step 1: Go into your admin area within Wordpress and write a new post, fill in the title and description as you would any other post and then go to the enclosure field.
Step 2: In enclosure url, type in the full path to your Podcast: http://www.yoursite.com/yourpodcast.mp3.
Step 3: In enclosure type, put in the type of file format. In this case: audio/mpeg.
Step 4: In enclosure length, type in the size of the file. One of the easiest ways is to locate your file and get info on it - File > Get Info. Remember to type in the amount without the coma. So for instance if your file is 114,564 bytes, just type in 114564.
Step 5: Publish your post. It may also be a good idea to paste the url to your Podcast in the body of your post so your visitors can listen to it this way as well.
Now anybody who subscribes to your RSS feed will be able to download your Podcast and listen to it. Obviously it helps if you submit your Podcast to http://www.ipodder.org/ and any other Podcast directory as well.
I hope these pages have been of use to you and obviously I can't list the procedure for every single weblog software out there although I would love to get some feedback from you and hopefully provide more information on other Blogs.
