If you have a WordPress blog, there’s now an easy way to write your post and include your podcast all in one go. Not only that, you can get your podcast into iTunes in that one go.
You achieve this with Podpress, a cool plugin for WordPress that lets you do this:
- Full featured and automatic iTunes feed generation
- Auto-generation of enclosure tag
- Makes adding a podcast to a post very simple
- View MP3 files ID3 tags when you’re posting, and copy ID3 data to the post title and content.
- Control over where the player will display within your post.
- Support for various formats, including video podcasting
- Automatic media player for MP3, MP4, MOV, FLV, and more, with inline and popup window support.
- Preview of what your podcast will look like on iTunes
- Easy way to link to your podcast within iTunes
I’ve just installed the plugin (which I found a bit tricky: more on that in a minute) and writing a Podpress-enabled post just to try it out and see how simple it is to do.
The podcast I’m including below is a short recording I made yesterday. Quite an appropriate one, I think - this recording is some ‘audio thoughts’ I sent to Nicole Simon yesterday to answer her question “Do you think blogging podcasters are more successful than just podcasters?” More (a post) on that later; meanwhile, read Nicole’s post to find out what this is about.
I mentioned that installing the Podpress plugin was a bit tricky. Maybe it was just me, but the installation instructions weren’t too clear and I ended up on my first attempt with weird PHP and 404 errors.
A bit more careful study showed me that the place on my server where I’d uploaded one of the key files to was incorrect. Once I fixed that, no more problems.
So if you’re thinking about installing Podpress into your WordPress blog, let me save you any potential head-scratching with a clear indicator of where the files go:
- podpress.php - this goes into the root of your /plugins directory.
- the folder podpress (and its contents) goes into your /plugins directory.
Note well - podpress.php goes into /plugins and not /plugins/podpress (that’s the error I made).
Once you’ve uploaded the Podpress files, just follow the rest of the installation instructions to enable it in your blog. There’s also a pretty good Camtasia video walk-through by the School of Podcasting that you might find helpful as well.
This really is an awesome plugin for WordPress. What do you think?
[Technorati: podpress, wordpress plugin]
[Edit 12/4/06] For a reason I still haven’t solved, the file now won’t play. I upgraded PodPress today to the latest verison 4.71 and now it’s producing errors if you click on the player. Hope to solve that soon.
[Edit2 12/4/06] Fixed. The file now plays. This version of Podpress makes use of an .htaccess file in the podpress directory, which I hadn’t enabled correctly.
