podcast
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A podcast is an episodic series of audio and/or video posts that can be subscribed to and downloaded for offline listening/viewing.
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Why
Why should you have a podcast? Some people like listening to them when:
- walking / running / exercising in general
- driving, e.g. on a roadtrip
- commuting (by any method)
How
iTunes (proprietary) and RSS/Atom are the dominant ways to publish and consume podcast feeds.
How to publish
Publish a RSS/Atom with podcast audio inside media enclosures, and/or use iTunes.
How to consume
Podcasts are RSS/Atom/XML feeds where, normally, the media of the podcast is linked to with an enclosure tag eg: <enclosure url="http://example.com/podcast01.mp3" length="259429328" type="audio/mpeg" />
However, most podcasts also include a number of other iTunes specific tags to ensure itunes will subscribe to them easily, eg <itunes:summary>. Some of these itunes tags are usually just replications of the data in other tags in the item.
Most podcast players both consume podcast feeds and play podcast audio. iTunes is the primary player on OS X and iOS. Other platforms have other players, e.g. BeyondPod on Android.
Some podcasts only publish on iTunes. You can subscribe to them in other players with hacks like Feed Flipper.
IndieWeb Examples
IndieWeb examples of personal podcast publishing and consuming
Ben Werdmuller
Ben Werdmüller has published podcasts on werd.io using Known
- First 2014-11-02: http://werd.io/2014/the-top-podcasts-are-professional-but-everyones-voice-should-be
- An RSS feed of all posts tagged #podcastsunday: http://werd.io/content/all/?q=%23podcastsunday&_t=rss
Acegiak
Ashton McAllan consumes podcasts through her reader Whisperfollow which aggregates RSS and, if they are marked up with podcast media tags, embeds the media for consumption and provides a link to save or open in another window
gRegor Morrill
gRegor Morrill has published a podcast on http://latenighttoast.com using ProcessWire
- First 2015-05-07: http://latenighttoast.com/episodes/001-episode-305/
- Generating the RSS feed [1] on the same domain so that we can control the canonical URL of the feed after submitting it to iTunes.
- Using archive.org to host the MP3s.
- Using URLs on the same domain that redirect to the archive.org MP3s, again so that we control the canonical URL of the MP3. This also gives us the ability to roughly track the number of streams/downloads of each episode.
Jeenas Excellent Encounters
Jeena Paradies is publishing a podcast on https://jeena.net/pods
- using his own implementation with Ruby on Rails
- It's marked up with a h-feed h-entry and u-audio
- It also has a RSS feed for iTunes and other podcast managers
Marty McGuire
Marty McGuire is publishing a podcast at https://wehavetoask.com/
- static site generated with Ruby
- index marked up as an h-feed with h-entry and u-audio
- Also has an RSS feed for iTunes and other podcast managers
Other Examples
Wavelist
Wavelist is a collection of podcast episodes curated into playlists by individuals.
Distribution
There are number of services for distributing your podcast without having to make copies (thus different from POSSE / syndication in general).
Huffduffer
Huffduffer is a bookmarking service for podcasts and audio / music / speech in general.
To submit your podcast to Huffduffer, create an account, submit your podcast with various tags.
Users of Huffduffer can then find your podcast by tag.
iTunes
iTunes is a service and application from Apple for music, video, podcasts and other multimedia. Podcasts distributed by iTunes are made easily discoverable and subscribable in:
- MacOS "iTunes" application
- iOS "Podcasts" application
Submitting to iTunes for distribution
See: How to Submit a Podcast at apple.com
When submitting a podcast URL to iTunes, be sure to submit a URL on a domain that you control. For example, if using Libsyn to host your podcast mp3s, don't submit the RSS URL that they provide. Instead, host a page on your domain that sends a "302 Found" temporary redirect to the Libsyn URL.
Changing podcast hosting providers
Podcast URL under your control
If your podcast URL is on your own domain, then you can just change the 302 redirect to point to the new hosting provider.
Podcast URL not under your control
If your podcast URL is not on your own domain, then the ability to change your URL is limited by whether your current host allows you to.
Libsyn has a writeup of how to change your feed URL.
Essentially the process involves setting an additional property in the feed URL.
<itunes:new-feed-url>http://newsite.example.com/podcast.rss</itunes:new-feed-url>
Services
Unmung
unmung will turn podcast feeds into playable HTML5 audio with microformats markup eg In Our Time
Brainstorming
How to podcast with h-feed
Aaron Parecki has an experimental podcast setup with h-feed.
- http://transportini.com/
- The top-level object is an h-feed with the podcast description
- Each episode is an h-entry child of the h-feed
- Each episode h-entry has the following properties:
- name - the episode name
- length - duration of the episode, e.g. "PT12M40S"
- size - the file size of the audio file "17.43mb"
- audio - the link to the mp3 file of the episode
- url - permalink to the episode's HTML page
- published
- summary - episode summary, intended to be displayed in players
