So here is Wayne again to share his continuing journey with us:
As we left our struggling hero last time, there was trouble in paradise. After a bit of problems getting the site off the ground, I finally had a great looking WordPress theme and I was starting to fill it in. Now to put in a podcast.
As you know, we tried using LoudBlog as the site. (Loudblog dropped off the face of the earth soon after that. Their website has been “under construction� for over a month now. That will automatically upload your mp3 to the site, enclose it, then post it. It did that fine, but I couldn’t change the mp3 or delete it after it was posted, and that could become a problem. By using WordPress, now you need to have ftp access to post the mp3. The mp3 then needs to be RSS “enclosed� so that it gets posted as a podcast. Here is how I was able to do it.
If your main site is the WordPress site, than WordPress needs to be installed in your “home� directory on your ftp site. Normally, It’s where you would put your “index.html� file if you had a normal web site, so usually it’s under the public_html directory. It could have different names depending on your hosting company, mine happens to be just plain directory name of html. At first I tried putting in a Media directory alongside the html directory. The browser couldn’t find it under the domain name. Now, a lot of you might be seeing right away what I’m doing wrong, but that’s why your the expert and I’m just learning. If you put your files into a directory within the WordPress directory, then you can type www.domain.com/media/123.mp3 and voilà ! It can see the light!
So to make a long story short, in the WordPress directory I made two folders. Media and Pod. In the Media folder, I put in some pictures, like the CVN logo. In the Pod folder, I put in the actual podcast. Turned out being http://www.chestervermontnews.com/media/chesterlogo.jpg and http://www.chestervermontnews.com/pod/CVN0001.mp3.
Now I’ve got the WordPress site posted and entries started to be made. I’ve got an accessible media site and mp3 site. Next time I’ll take on making everything public and easy to subscribe to. That’s really the trick today, though, isn’t it? Making it available to someone in the easiest way possible. That’s why we have to make everything go to public, instead of the public come to us. It’s why Netflix and The iTunes Store is so popular. We want everything to come to us automatically with as little effort as possible. So, that’s what we’ll do. Luckily, the blogger and podcaster forefathers have already blazed the trail for us, and there are some very handy, terrific tools and sites out there to let us do it very easily.