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First Time Podcasting with WordPress

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A follow-up question from @rsmith to my post for Tools, Gear and Hardware for a First Time Podcaster:

WordPress Plugin for Podcasting

As with most things podcasting, there’s a ton of plugins for WordPress to use. What I’ve settled on is using the Blubrry PowerPress plugin:

Blubrry PowerPress brings the essential features for podcasting to WordPress. Developed by podcasters for podcasters, PowerPress offers full iTunes support, Web audio/video media players, exclusive subscribe tools, podcasting SEO features and more.

Once you activate PowerPress on your WordPress install – subscribe to my YouTube tutorial series if you want to see how – PowerPress has a great walk through on getting all your details written in so that your podcast can be ready to be submitted to iTunes.

Hosting your podcast media files on your WordPress install is ok at first but I’d really recommend investing in some sort of media hosting platform – Blubrry‘s looks great but I haven’t tried it yet. Libsyn is a service I do use and works great.

As with the earlier post, I’m glossing over a bit of the details here so I don’t get lost in the weeds.

Update: Ryan had a follow-up question that I felt was worth adding in here:

Two reasons: One is certainly bandwidth concerns. Each web host will respond differently to having a 50MB – 100MB file being downloaded by a whole bunch of people. Hosts like Libsyn or Blubrry are set up as content distribution networks (CDN for techie nerds) specifically for podcast – fast downloads or streaming of your podcast to your listeners is important. Just like you don’t want to wait for Netflix to catch up, you don’t want your listeners to have to wait.

The second reason is stats. This assumes you’re at least as vain as me (…pause for a moment while I go check the stats on my podcasts… Ok, I’m back.) and want to know if anyone is listening. It also helps if you should ever want to pursue sponsorship for your podcast – potential advertisers will want to know accurate download numbers.

This isn’t a requirement when you’re just starting out, but it’ll help when you get further down the road. Do you want to spend a couple bucks on your podcasting hobby or just keep it all cheap/near free? It’s up to you.

Services to Share Your Podcast With

At Goodstuff.fm we use iTunes as our primary focus but we’ve had good success with podcasts being featured in podcast apps listing services – i.e. Pocket Cast – but we’re also playing around with Stitcher and iHeartRadio. Still too early to tell if it’s worth it.

Now What?

I love podcasting and think it’s a vastly under-utilized medium. I’m taking on clients to help them get started using podcasting – contact me if you’re wanting one-on-one help with any aspect of podcasting.

As I said the first post, feel free to leave a comment below or ask me on Twitter if you have specific questions and I’ll do my best to answer all questions in a future post or a video.

I’m Not Distracted At All

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I’m trying out this distraction free writing mode on WordPress v4.1. It looks and works pretty sweet. It doesn’t take over the whole screen, just the window that you are working in. Which is kind of nice because then you can still see other things going on if you need to and a quick mouse movement outside the text box brings up the standard WordPress menu.

Check out a quick video of how it works.

It’s almost something they should just enable by default. I could see clients/users I interact with enjoying it but not likely to find it or even use it because it sounds “fancy” to enable a distraction free writing zone when you’re just updating the company blog about a new widget that’s on sale.

But it works for that level of writing just as well as it does for long form, thought-leader thought-pieces like what you’d commonly find on Medium.com.

I’d suggest you click the little expander “X” thing above your WordPress content block and try it out.

expanderx-thing-WordPress 4.1

Postbot for WordPress Photo Blogs

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Great new service from the folks behind WordPress called Postbot:

Postbot will create a post for each photo and schedule it to appear at a certain time over a given number of days. This is the ideal way to share a lot of photos without having to manually create and schedule each one.

When everything is ready just pick a schedule — a start date and the number of days between each photo — and we’ll do the rest. If you want to exclude the weekends then that’s fine too.

In order to use Postbot on a self-hosted WordPress site, you’ll need to have the Jetpack plugin installed with the JSON API enabled.

The obvious use for Postbot would be for a photography blog, but using it on a regular blog to interject photos could be a great way to keep the site fresh without having to manually post something as often.

Matt Mullenweg on Automattic’s Purchase of Simplenote

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On the new Simplenote:

The beauty of Simplenote being under Automattic’s wing is that we are already blessed with incredibly fruitful businesses in WordPress.com, Akismet, and VaultPress. The biggest thing I didn’t like about the old app was the ads, and as you’ve noticed those are gone in this new version. Our main goal is to pour our heart into something and make it great, then it with the world. I find Simplenote indispensable, delightful, and use it every day, and I hope you will too.

I hope Matt finds more apps I like useful and indispensable and buys them, makes them free and remove the ads. Starting with Instacast and Reeder.

Simplenote is a cross platform note taking app: iOS, Mac, Android and Kindle.

Site Was Hacked Last Night

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My apologies if you saw a couple of posts about financial news last night on the site or via RSS – somehow a person/bot created a user account on my blog with administrator privileges and posted a couple of articles. I haven’t figured out anything else they might have done but I will be scanning the site throughout the day and watching for anything else odd.

The place I noticed an odd setting was under Settings -> General (/wp-admin/options-general.php on your WordPress install):

How My Install Was Configured:

WordPress Settings Anyone Can Register

How It Should Be Configured:

WordPress Settings Anyone Can Register

I don’t think I set it up the way it was with anyone being able to register AND be given Administrator access – but I have had this blog running for a long time so maybe I did at one point and forgot to turn it off. Or maybe there’s a backdoor somewhere in one of my plugins?

Sucuri didn’t turn anything up but like I said, I’ll keep scanning throughout the day. Thanks to @claybitner for pointing it out to me this morning.

Markdown on Save Improved 2.3 Released

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Previously on Twitter:

It went from being a “why would I ever use that?” to “I can’t run a website without it” in the shortest time of any plugin I’ve used on WordPress.

The plugin hadn’t been updated in an embarrassingly long time, but I finally got around to fixing some bugs around mobile publishing and updating the included Markdown Extra library to the latest version. It won’t go without updates so long again.

Markdown on Save Improved (or MOSI as I prefer to call it when I never say it out loud) is developed by Matt Wiebe.

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