I was wondering if anyone was currently podcasting from Reclaim? A couple colleagues and I are interested in setting something up and are investigating a few options for hosting. Is it recommended to host audio files on a regular Reclaim server or are we better at looking at a seperate media server. I’m not necessarily worried about the file size in terms of storage space - but am concerned about server traffic and load.
I’m currently looking at options for building an accompanying website - using Podcast Generator or actually building something customised using Jekyll. That way we can get show notes etc up and generate the required RSS feeds.
Keen to learn from anyone with experience!
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Podcast Generator looks pretty slick! Back in the day I used the PowerPress plugin for WordPress to do much of the heavy lifting but always found it a bit bloated. Unless you’re thinking your podcast is going to be incredibly popular I wouldn’t worry too much about traffic/bandwidth concerns. Most podcasting clients like iTunes are just going to download the file locally to the device so your site isn’t having to stream audio in realtime. That being said with longer podcasts the file sizes can become an issue. An mp3 doesn’t seem like it would be large until it’s an hour long and takes up a few hundred megabytes (depending on the quality you go with) so something like Amazon S3 storage can be a good option there (perhaps with Cloudfront as a CDN on top). I’ve written in the past about a setup using that at https://blog.timowens.io/boosting-page-load-times-with-amazon-cloudfront-and-w3-total-cache/ (back when I used WordPress).
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Hasn’t Doug Belshaw changed over to using Podcast Generator for TIDE Podcast. I know he is with Reclaim. He might be someone who can shed more light …
Ah you’re right! I just falsely assumed it was a WP install but just now checked out the footer and it’s Podcast Generator. Looks very slick.
Thanks for the tips Tim & Aaron. Using S3 for storage is a really useful tip - I’m yet to get into AWS myself, so this might be a nice project to learn from. I checked out Podcast Generator - saw Doug on Twitter mentioning it. It’s pretty slick and easy to set up… but it’s a little lack lustre in the looks department. That said - FTP upload and fill in the Admin Wizard and you’re up and running in 5 minutes. Definitely can recommend it!
I did however decided to build my own site using Jekyll. Basically I write a post for each episode, fill some extra info into the YAML front matter and Jekyll builds me a page and generates the RSS. Files are just links basically - so they could easily live in an S3 folder rather than the site. I placed a HTML5 audio player in there so people can preview or download the file. Just have to finalise a domain etc and once that’s done submit the RSS to iTunes to get a Subscribe button! Feel free to view the preview - Link Rot - all running on GitHub at the moment, be aware it’s not finished yet - need to clean up files and finish off a few loose ends. Repo is here if you want to poke around the code GitHub - timklapdor/link-rot: Developing a Jekyll powered podcast site. Hoping to finish it off over the weekend.
If you actually listen to anything - let me know what you think!
Hi all, and thanks Tim for making me aware of this discussion!
Not much to add to what’s already been said, other than the workflow with Podcast Generator is spectacularly straightforward. The only thing that’s frustrating is the number of characters allowed in the ‘long description’ field - but I think that’s an iTunes-imposed restriction.
I wonder what Douglas Rushkoff and his team are using for the Team Human podcast? Now that’s slick!
Looks like they’re using WordPress http://builtwith.com/teamhuman.fm. Not sure if they use any podcast-specific stuff for the media feeds but I see Visual Composer in the plugin list which probably accounts for how nicely-designed it looks.
@timklapdor I love the header on that site so much. The fade to white blending with the logo is absolutely brilliant.
I am betting good money that is Soundbyte Progression.
Feel free to be terrified of my abilities at spotting random WordPress themes. (For the record I did not view source but I did just confirm.)
cc @dajbelshaw
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Thanks Tim! I think the white was accidental - but I liked the effect so kept it! Hosting the files with S3 looks like a smart (and easy thing to do). Found this really simple walk through How to Host Your Podcast Files on Amazon S3 - the permissions for your bucket script was nice and easy to apply.
We run edutalk.cc on reclaim on pretty vanilla Wordpress. (Some slightly weird stuff in the loop to deal with contributions pulled in from audioboom with feedwordpress).
The site is not high volume but has a lot (>2000) of post. We have had no complaints.
I’m a year late on this one but stumbled onto this thread and wanted to let you know that I found the tutorial you linked to very helpful. Am now running my podcast (plug: Media and the End of the World) using Powerpress + S3. Really liked the idea of the Jekyll approach, but needed to keep the WP interface for my colleague who wants to also write posts on the site. I’ll write a blog post on it soon on my method.
Alright, I’m continuing to raise this thread from the dead but wanted to drop in a link to the blog post that I just wrote about how I’m now using AWS S3 for the podcast. Hopefully somebody else stumbles here as well and finds it useful!
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