Experience Publishing a Podcast

My experience setting up a podcast was relatively straightforward. The process was definitely more involved than the previous assignments of setting up a blog or YouTube posting. This is my first experience actually creating and publishing a podcast though I’ve consumed podcasts in the past. My first step was to search for a guide describing a start to finish recipe. I found a guide that incorporated Blogger and I attempted to follow the instructions.

I found that the most challenging step was to host the physical media file on a web site. (edit) [I missed the moodle forum post where my prof directs us to use podbean] There were several suggested sites for hosting media files; some of them were free, others had a free trial, but none of the ones I tried was easy to use. I already had a Google Docs and SkyDrive account for hosting files in the cloud. Therefore, I attempted to serve a media file from Google Docs but the URL does not resolve to the actual media file, rather, the URL serves a page where the media file may be downloaded. …Ditto for SkyDrive. I needed a hosting service for a few other projects and decided to drop 4 dollars on a normal web hosting service that I could also use to host the media files. I registered a domain at Go Daddy and signed up for a simple web hosting service. Within about 15 minutes, my site was up and I was able to use their FTP tool to upload my media files. At this point, I had a live URL to the media files; I posted a Blogger blog post with a link containing the URL to my media file. Then, I provided my Blogger URL to my Google Feedburner service. Since this service is part of the Google single-sign-on landscape, getting started was painless. Feedburner provides a means to distribute content by subscription to a web portal, news reader, or podcast. The FeedBurner site provides a decent overview of feeds (http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=79408&cbid=79408&src=cb&lev= index ).
I verified that my audio file was available through ITunes by clicking on the ITunes link on the Feedburner site. My ITunes application loaded and I was able to see my podcast audio entry in the podcasts section.