Building a Movable Type Podcast

Posted by Miles Evans

If you are using Movable Type or any blog software you likely know there is a ton of buzz over hosting your own podcast. People seem to like to muddy the waters over podcasting by casting it in a mysterious light but there is no need to be confused. A podcast is a link to an audio or other media file. That’s it that’s all. The fancy name just comes from the fact people like downloading this type of stuff to their Ipods. Get it?

Ok so the real trick is getting the media file to show up in RSS readers. I will cover how to do this in a moment but take a look at the screenshot below to see why this is so l33t. It's a bit hard to make out from the image but my podcast is showing up in my RSS reader allowing users to download it without even visiting my website.

Check out the podcast in this entry I made on recording skype to see how I style mine. The image in the top right is rendered with CSS. Here is how I styled it:

a.podcastr {
display:block;
padding-right: 65px;
padding-bottom: 25px;
background-image: url(images/podicon.gif);
background-repeat:no-repeat;
float : right;
}

You can play with the CSS to suit your needs but basically all you have to do now is call it like this:

<a href="http://www.profitpapers.com/podcasts/podcast.mp3" title="listen to the podcast" class="podcastr"> </a>

Ok so that is fairly easy and it looks cool, but what about getting it to show up in your RSS feed like I mentioned earlier? For that you will need a plugin and the one I like to use is called MT-Enclosures by Brandon Fuller. Upload the plugin and then simply insert <$MTEntryEnclosures mime_include="audio"$> anywhere between the <item> tag in your RSS 2.0 Index template. This tag will wrap your audio file in an <enclosure> tag which is used by RSS readers.

MT-Enclosures can be set to ping media websites when you submit entries as well as work with many other types of files besides just audio. For a better description of it's usage and some known problems be sure to visit the MT-Enclosures release page.

So that is pretty much it. Check that your feed is being built properly by viewing it in your favorite reader and start podcasting.

For a nice set of buttons for your podcast, including the one I snatched, check out Tim Madden’s blog.

Posted Mar 01, 2006 at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Trackback URL | Del.icio.us | DIGG!