How-To Podcast with WordPress
I came accross this really simple tutorial on how to use WordPress as a podcasting engine … take a look at it. What is so amazing is how easy it really is!

It can be easier. For example, with JournURL, creating a podcast is as simple as:

1. Create the audio file
2. Post an entry, and attach your MP3

That's it. You can make it even better with minimal effort, too.

For example, I've seen WP users advocating setting up a separate installation to handle podcasting, to keep podcatchers from missing your 'casts amidst your other blog entries. That's unnecessary with JournURL... just add a "mypodcast" keyword to your podcast entries, and then have folks subscribe to a URL like this:

http://mysite.com/?template=rss&keyword=mypodcast

In addition, JournURL automatically collects ID3 info from any MP3 you upload, making it easy to add all sorts of metadata to a podcast post.

Now, don't get me wrong... WordPress and JournURL are fruit of different flavors. One is an open-source, self-hosted tool, the other a hosted service. If you need the former, then the latter is useless, no matter how many nice things it does. That's why I hate making these kinds of comparisons.

But folks don't know what you can do if you never tell them, so I'm tellin' 'em.

Dave Winer:
Apple has defined a namespace for podcast information. Just took a brief look. Some of it is non-controversial. Some of it is.

I've had a look, and Apple's effort seems fine. In fact, I have to disagree with Dave's complaints about their itunes:category and itunes:author elements.

• itunes:author Dave has a blind spot when it comes to rss:author... he just doesn't accept that 99.9% of us have no desire to syndicate our email addresses to the world at large, and that's exactly what rss:author wants us to do. I just hope Apple was smart enough to support stuff like dc:creator in the iTunes app itself, so the existing workarounds for rss:author will work for their users.
• itunes:category I think their "duplication" of rss:category was appropriate. They're declaring a limited set of acceptable categories, and it would suck to see them pollute the general categorization space with such notions.

Overall, not bad. Although they get points off for publishing in PDF rather than HTML.

As a result, my podcast feed should contain a new post, including the data extracted from the comments.

download applause_1.mp3

First, I integrated an ID3-tag parser into JournURL's enclosure support. If it sees that you're attaching an audio file to an entry, the file will be scanned for useful data, and said data will be saved along with your post.

Next, I updated the <weblog:attachment> template tag to output various useful data, where present.

And then I hit the tough part... where to put the data in my feed? In the spirit of doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, I decided to nest the metadata within the RSS 2.0 <enclosure> element, using a namespaced extension that references the ID3 documentation. The names of the elements in the extension match the names of existing ID3 tags.

UPDATED: I received a suggestion to move the ID3 elements out of <enclosure>, so I have in my new test feed. I've also slapped together some rudimentary documentation.