Getting Ready to Podcast

I've posted a link to a good, cross-platform podcast receiver, iPodder ("lemon iPodder" button on right side of page under links). If you want to, go ahead and download it, play with it a bit and get an idea what it does. That way you will be ready when we get our first podcast ready.

Right now all we need in order to podcast is one of our mp3 archives posted on the On Computers Web server. I could do that by downloading this weeks mp3 show archive and reposting it to an On Computer's Web site (the On Computers tips site in my case), and then posting the link to that mp3 file here, but I'm going to leave that job to one of our volunteers who has a broadband connection.

Once we do have an archived mp3 posted on the On Computers Web server, I will post a link in the appropriate format to that file here to be picked up by feedburner. You will need to use the feedburner feed for this to work so get the url from the "XML" button in the right hand column of this page. Put that link in iPodder's "add feed manually" dialog on the status tab. That should do it. Then you will be ready for our podcast.

Of course if you have another favorite podcast receiver, go ahead and use it.

Once we have a podcast posted, iPodder (or the podcast receiver of your choice) will download the mp3 file to your computer. What you do from there depends. You certainly can play it right on your computer in any mp3 player software. You can also use your favorite software capable of syncing to send the mp3 to your player, including an iPod -- which of course is the genesis of word "podcast". You don't have to have an iPod to do this and most mp3 players will work. I tested it with the iPodder feed and synced it using Windows Media Player to my flash memory based mp3 player. That worked like a charm.

By now, if you didn't know before, a podcast is a media file download using an RSS newsfeed and podcast receiver as the delivery mechanism to your computer. This has the advantage of being easy to update automatically once the link to the latest mp3 archive is posted.

Of course as I write this we still haven't tested a thing of ours, but I'm confident that once posted in the proper format, our weekly mp3 archive file will podcast sucessfully.

By the way, did I mention that all of this is being done at no additional cost to our little cadre of volunteers except for our time? We are using free and freely available tools. They include Blogger, Feedburner, and of course the aforementioned iPodder receiver. You might enjoy checking them out for yourself.