The next step up from blogging is podcasting. People in their pajamas blog, but many of the same people, though less often in their pajamas, sit in front of a digital or audio recorder and make podcasts. Short pieces are recorded and then sent to their site, which is usually a blog, through RSS 2.0 or Atom. Then, podcast clients can be used to download podcasts by listeners and viewers. A good podcast client, like Juice, CastPodder, or iTunes, will let you subscribe to the RSS/Atom feed of your favorite podcasters and automatically download new episodes to your computer or a portable audio player when they come out.
Most podcasters make their content in the form of MP3 or MP4 audio or video files that they then upload and link to in a blog post. If the user isn't already subscribed to the RSS/Atom feed, they can click the link to download the content. The problem has never been getting the content to the website; the problem has always been getting the content to work through the feed systems. Most of the time, WordPress will add new podcasting information to your RSS/Atom feed system automatically. This makes it easy for you to send content to your users and for them to sign up for that content.
Most people will find that WordPress 1.5 and higher makes it easy and automatic to the podcast. When you use the full URL to link to an audio file in a WordPress post, it gets added to the RSS/Atom feed and can be used as a podcast. Be sure to use a complete address:
Wrong: My podcast
My podcast is right.
The last thing you need to do is add a link to your RSS/Atom feed to your page. The feeds are at the bottom of your WordPress page by default. If you use RSS, the link should look something like this:
In older versions of WordPress, automated links only worked for posts, not for pages that don't change. Because WordPress needs to keep accurate information about file sizes, if you change a linked file, you should make sure to republish the post that has the link. If you linked to a file that isn't fully accessible from your blog for whatever reason, your podcast won't work right because WordPress won't have the right file size information.
For Apache servers and others that use the.HTTP access file, you'll need to add a directive to the config file.HTTP access file so that the server knows how to handle podcast files (m4a and m4b). Just add this line to the file you want to use:
