I was asked by Matt sometime ago if I would create an entry in Codex describing how to podcast with WordPress.  There is already a nice article there, but I thought I would go ahead and create this tutorial for the sake of completeness.

Welcome those of you surfing here from 9rules, Airbag Industries, Photo Matt and Forever Geek.  I am continually surprised when someone thinks my ramblings here are worth mentioning, so thanks for the linkup Scrivs and Greg!

So here it is, I decided to record this tutorial as a podcast as well as a proof of concept.  Enjoy.

First a little background

For anyone out there who is still unaware of the phenomenon known as podcasting, lets take a moment to reflect. Podcasting is the brainchild of washed up MTV VJ who has found new life as the godfather of podcasting, and the always fashionable person to hate Dave Winer.

In a nutshell podcasting allows you to create your own audio programming and then deliver it via the web.

The socially acceptable way to distribute podcasts are through RSS enlcosures. RSS enclosures allow you to reference binary data, in our case an audio file, from within your RSS feed.

Podcast readers then subscribe to an RSS feed and download the audio files contained in the enclosures, and some like the forthcoming iTunes update will then move those downloaded audio files to your portable audio player for later consumption.

So lets look at how to podcast with WordPress shall we?

Steps to podcast with wordpress

1. Create an audio file with the software of your choice, I am using Quicktime Pro, but there are great free alternatives like wavepad for the windows operating system, Rosegarden for Linux and Audacity for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux et al.
2. Upload that mp3 to a server, either your own or one of the myriad, nay veritable cornacopia of servers that are available for this task. I am a big fan of the Internet Archive myself. If you use the Internet Archive you can grab the Creative Commons Uploader to make your life easier.
3. Create a post in WordPress, in which you reference the URI of said mp3, and then hit publish.

And that’s it. Now just pimp out that RSS URI so that people can find an download your stereophonic masterpiece.