Of the nature of old school blogging is quaint and dated, podcasting may not be far behind.
Ever since the start of a podcasting project interrupted by a hurricane Antonio Vantaggiato and I have been hodgepodging a podcast series we call “The Puerto Rico Connection” (yes the play on the movie title was deliberate but there is no overlap of plots).
I suggested maybe we not worry about committing to a platform, it seems like everywhere you run into a great service that ultimately limits what you can do for free before asking for $. We did four episodes on TapeWrite which we enjoyed, but the overhead of adding media cards took us down time sinkholes, especially when we yacked for over an hour.
Our cheaptech setup is to record from Skype using the Ecamm Call Recorder (useful as it splits our calls into separate audio tracks), and edited with Audacity.
My next idea was to serve them from my Reclaim Hosting account using Podcast Generator, which I had used as the audio source for a web site client. I though we would write up our shows as a publication on Medium.
I’ve used some of my March travel opportunities to connect with Antonio while in Guadalajara with Brian Lamb and Grant Potter and in Fredericksburg with Jim Groom. Look for some summer episodes when Antonio is traveling in Italy.
But then, as pften as not, Blog Struck Again, with Adam Croom’s post about his workflow using Amazon S3 (for media storage) and a web site and PowerPress plugin to manage the feeds.
I was inspired to try, for the sale of earning some new things, but also, of not relying on third party publishing platforms that may bite the dust someday.
So cut to the chance, welcome to our new Puerto Rico Connection site
I’ve mixed together the podcast episodes as a category of posts along with other related non-podcast ones. The Podcast feed is https://prconnection.cogdog.casa/feed/podcast/ (still waiting to hear back from iTunes of our submission).
A while ago I played every so slightly with Amazon Web Services, but never with S3; the tutorial Adam linked to was direct enough for me to get set up. For uploading the mp3s, I did find out the Firefox extension mentioned did not work with Quantum, and that I had trued and used a Chrome Extension (the web is moving and morphing always, friends).
The one thing to remember is always going to the AWS console to set the upload as public (it does not seem to inherit the bucket’s settings to be public, or I am a dolt and missed something).
But as is our audio have elegant URLs like https://s3.amazonaws.com/prconnection/ep003.mp3
For the WordPress web site I went back to an Anders Noren theme I know well, Garfunkel, that is the parent them for the SPLOTbox theme.
For SPLOTbox I had already figured out how to add an HTML5 audio player which is not supported in the parent theme- this is where if the format type is audio, I use a function I wrote that checks if it has an mp3 url in the part above the more tag, and if so, embeds the player. For this site I also added support for featured images so the player is tucked below it.
So on the front page, you get a player:
If you want to gaze at code…
|
1 |
<!--?php elseif ( $format == 'audio' ) : ?--> |
post_excerpt; ?>
These are the helper functions I also brought over, they might be more than this site needs, but they do work.
|
1 2 3 4 5 6 |
function prconnection_get_audioplayer( $url ) { // output the audio player $audioplayer = ' <audio class="audio-player" controls="controls"> <source src="' . $url . '" /></audio>' . "\n"; return ($audioplayer); } function url_is_audio ( $url ) { // tests urls to see if they point to an audio type if ( is_in_url( 'soundcloud.com', $url ) or url_is_audio_link( $url ) ) return true; } function url_is_audio_link ( $url ) { $fileExtention = pathinfo ( $url, PATHINFO_EXTENSION ); // get file extension for url $allowables = array( 'mp3', 'm4a'); // allowable file extensions // check the url file extension to ones we will allow return ( in_array( strtolower( $fileExtention) , $allowables ) ); } // check if $url contacts a string (like domain name) function is_in_url ( $pattern, $url ) { if ( strpos( $url, $pattern) === false ) { return (false); } else { return (true); } } function is_url_embeddable( $url ) { // test if URL matches the ones that Wordpress can do oembed on // test by by string matching $allowed_embeds = array( 'youtube.com/watch?', 'youtu.be', 'vimeo.com', 'soundcloud.com', ); // walk the array til we get a match foreach( $allowed_embeds as $fragment ) { if (strpos( $url, $fragment ) !== false ) { return ( true ); } } // no matches, no embeds for you return ( false ); } |
I also added to the meta data in the footer a link to download the audio (it also makes sure the URL gets in the feed)
With this bit of code in the single.php template
|
1 2 3 |
<!--?php if ( isset($media_url) AND url_is_audio_link ( $media_url ) ) echo '<p-->Download "' . get_the_title() . '" |
|
1 2 |
'; ?> |
And following Adam’s lead, the PowerPress podcast plugin seems to add the necessary iTunes meta data to the feed. This is a nice trick to preface the Amazon S3 links with https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/ to work as the Media URL
I also decided to enable the link style format types, so we could include references to wonderful posts like this one:
https://twitter.com/ParisaMehran/status/997106014045470721
on our site as
We are still checking the tires, but I’m pretty happy with both what we have as a site we own and as always a few more skills, tricks, and technical card games I learned along the way.
Featured Image: Could not resist a classic Brian Lamb photo from the heady days of blogging AND podcasting in 2006:
Man With a Microphone flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
Nice work! As many times as I’ve followed your lead with virtually every “innovative” course design decision I’ve ever made (literally…syndication, SPLOTs, Assignment Bank, Daily Create), it feels very rewarding to see it go the other direction. 🙂
For fully self-hosted podcasts, without dependencies on third parties for storing your content, check out the Podlove plugin. It’s what I’m using for my hopeful podcast thing, if I ever get past “holy crap there’s too much work to be done I’ll do the podcast thing when things calm down a bit”, which is now almost 6 months in…
Anyway.
https://publisher.podlove.org/
almost forgot – Podlove does require access to the filesystem to FTP up the audio files. So, it won’t work on a shared multisite server but would work great on a standalone wordpress install…
Always many more ways to slice and dice to prepare a tech meal! I really liked the simplicity, and no database thang of Podcast Generator for hosting your own files- it does uploads via a web form interface. I used it to manage the files and feed for my local brewery’s site:
http://podcast.thatbrewery.com/
It also took care of publishing the feed into itunes but I never send people there. The public facing posts were just in their web site
http://thatbrewery.com/podcasts/
What it comes down to, it seems, is of your audience is small, then running from a share hosting account is not a problem. I’m not clear where the bog down starts; I doubt I will ever experience the podcast fame problem.