How To Podcast Using Wordpress
Author: Danny Wirken

Podcasting is the next step up from blogging. While blogging is
done by armies of pajama-clad ordinary people, podcasting is
done by many of these same people, though less often in
pajamas, in front of a digital or audio recorder. Short pieces
are recorded, then distributed via RSS 2.0 or Atom to their
website, typically a blog site. Listeners and viewers can then
download podcasts using podcast clients. A good podcast client
(for example, Juice, CastPodder, or iTunes) will allow you to
subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed of your favorite podcasters and
automatically download the content to a computer or to a
portable audio player when new items are available.

Most podcasters create their content in MP3 or MP4 audio or
video files and upload them, linking to the file in a blog
post. Users can then click the link to download the content if
they're not automatically subscribed to the RSS/Atom feed. The
problem has never been in getting the content to the web page,
but in getting the content to work through the feed systems.
Wordpress, in most cases, will automatically include new
podcasting data in your RSS/Atom feed system. This makes it
easy for you to deliver content and for your users to subscribe
to that content.

For most people, WordPress 1.5 and above will podcast easily
and automatically. When you link to the audio file in a
WordPress post using the full URL address, it automatically
adds it to the RSS/Atom feed and makes it usable as a podcast.
Make sure you use a full address:

Wrong: My podcast
Right: My podcast

Your last step is to put a link to your RSS/Atom feed on your
page. By default, the feeds are located at the bottom of your
WordPress page. The link should look something like this if
you're using RSS:

http://example.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2

If you're using Atom, the link will look like this:

http://example.com/wordpress/?feed=atom

In earlier versions of WordPress, automated links work for
posts only, not for static pages. Because WordPress needs to
maintain accurate file size information, if you change a linked
file you should be certain to republish the post containing the
link. If you've linked to a file that for any reason is not
fully accessible from your blog, your podcast won't work
properly when it is up because WordPress won't have the correct
file size information.

For Apache servers and others that use the .htaccess file,
you'll need to add a directive to the config file or .htaccess
file to get the server to recognize podcast files (m4a and m4b)
properly. You can simply add this line to the file you use:

AddType audio/x-m4a .m4a>


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