Talking About Stuff, with Mike and Christiana

I mentioned in an earlier post that I was planning to try my hand at podcasting with a conversation between my friend Mike and I about the upcoming episode 3 of Survivor: Guatemala.

Still, in order to be at all timely, I would really want to be able to put that podcast up by Friday morning, but I suspected that it would take me a little while to figure out the technical details of the thing. As a result, I decided to do a non-Survivor podcast before then, when I would have more time to figure everything out.

So that's what I've done. Even got me an XML RSS feed and everything, with a lot of help from a few tutorials, such as this one. If you know what to do with those, you can find mine right here. I'll also be putting a link to it in the sidebar.

If you don't already know how to use them, what you need is an aggregator, like iPodder. (You can use that even if you don't use an iPod, btw.)

What the aggregator does for you is it allows you to subscribe to a podcast RSS feed like mine. You cut and paste the link I supplied above, or other feeds (generally indicated by an ".xml" suffix) and it "subscribes" you. When you are subscribed, the software reads the xml file and determines what podcasts are available on that file and downloads them (or not) per your settings. It can also automatically check for and download new episodes whenever they are posted. Pretty handy, eh?

iTunes also has podcast functionality where it acts as an aggregator for all podcasts in the iTunes podcast directory. I hope that mine will be listed there soon, but right now, it's in the review phase.

Now, if all of that sounds like too much work but you are still interested in listening, you can download the mp3 file directly right here: Christiana Talks About Stuff Podcast #1
(If you want to be nice to me and save me some bandwidth, please right-click and download the file, rather than playing it directly off of my server.) Fair warning, it's about 32MB. That works out to a total play time of around 23 minutes. Hopefully in the future, as I start figuring some of this stuff out, I'll be able to bring the relative file size down a bit.

Podcast #1 is pretty basic. I begin by introducing myself, (since I may end up with listeners who have not visited the blog,) then I begin what will likely be a series where I discuss and analyze some of my favorite movies. This time around, it's Groundhog Day. Then I finish up by playing a song from PodSafeAudio.com, which specializes in songs released under the Creative Commons license, making them safe for use in podcasts.

I'm not going to be ignoring the blog, and whenever I put up a new podcast, I'll definitely mention it here, but of course, if you subscribe to the feed, it will all go through automatically.

Also, this is my very first attempt at this sort of thing, and I'm sure it needs a lot of work. If you listen, please, please, please leave a comment or send me an email to let me know what you think or give me suggestions on what I could do better. In fact, if you have the capability, you could even send me comments in mp3 form, and you just might get some airtime on the next episode!

This is an ongoing invitation, and applies whether you are offering suggestions about the podcast itself, or whether you have a comment about the content. Thanks, and I hope you like it!

UPDATE!

I have now corrected some of the wonky volume levels in the first podcast. All the same links apply.

UPDATE AGAIN!

My podcast is now officially listed in the iTunes podcast directory. If you use iTunes, you can find and subscribe to it by searching "christiana" in the podcast directory.

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