A Quest for Podcasting

When Daddy told us about a Northern Flicker that he held in his hands, I just had to write a song about it. Bill and I recorded it in GarageBand and then used iWeb to make a podcast and post it to our Charter web space. iWeb is so easy to use and it makes beautiful pages. However, Charter limits you to 20 MB, so you can't put too many songs up and iWeb also generates a lot of unnecessary files, taking up a lot of room. You can see the Yellowhammer Man Charter podcast here: http://webpages.charter.net/bill-and-kim-walls/Site/Podcast/Podcast.html until they tell me there is no more room. "The Yellowhammer Man" is under "Archives."

Ed came to visit for Christmas and he renewed my interest in MySpace. I already had an account, but the site just didn't make a lot of sense until Ed showed me his site with "friends" and blog postings. So, I spent a lot of time changing my MySpace profile. I noted that some of my potential "friends" had music players on their profile pages and I wanted to add "The Yellowhammer Man" to my page. Turns out you can only select one song for the MySpace music player and that song has to come from one of the MySpace Band sites. So I made a band site for Bill and I at http://www.myspace.com/kimandbillwalls and uploaded some songs there. Then, I could refer to one of the songs for my personal MySpace profile at http://www.myspace.com/kkcwalls But, I still was searching for a great way to share our songs with our family. The MySpace Band sites look really nice, but you can have only 6 songs there.

So, on again for podcasting. Step One is to have a place to store your recordings on the internet. Charter and MySpace are limited in the number of files you can post. So, I tried some free accounts at MediaMaster, Box.net, and MediaMax. All of them allow you to save files for free and share them in some manner.

MediaMaster is a cool place to share your music with others. In fact, you can have your entire iTunes library on line so you can listen to your music anywhere. You can have a button for your "Radio" or you can use their cool Widget to show a playlist.
Here is a Radio button:

Here is the MediaMaster Widget...
But you can't have a nice page for each podcast like in iWeb.

With Box.net, you can give friend a link to download your files or you can use their widget for playing songs. You also can have an rss feed to list files to download. But since the links to the files don't have the file name extensions, I couldn't embed them in a blog. And, I didn't want to pay the monthly fee for that!
This widget plays public files we put on Box.net

..

Finally, I uploaded songs to MediaMax. After you place files in the "hosted" folder, you can then view and copy their URLs to list anywhere. This widget is just a Yahoo mp3 player with a list of files posted at MediaMax.

I like this solution the best for a player so far. MediaMax is free hosting and sharing, but the files have the real name extensions (mp3) so you can actually link to them. You can see the 3rd file (the MediaMaster link) does not work in an MP3 player.

Next step: Make a Blog posting. Well, now that the issue of having URLs to MP3 files is solved, it's easy to then make a blog posting that has the URL in it. As you can see, we use Blogger from Google (it's free and easy) for our blog. You can link to the MP3 by typing the URL in the Title's Link (click posting title above) or have an enclosure link (bottom) or by using html for a linked text or as an embedded player:

Then, you enable your RSS feed for Blogger and it's time to send the RSS to Feedburn or another such service. Here I am a little fuzzy as to why...but Feedburner takes the RSS and makes a podcast that can be accessed by other players such as the one I have below (in case you wanted the widget on another web site, I guess). This object shows our blog entries at Blogger (billandkimwalls.blogspot.com) that are distributed through Feedcast.



So, what does all this mean? I'm not sure right now! I'll come back and edit this later.