Podcasting All Over The Place

Well, our "no brainer" podcast is now available. Although I must admit, it was a bit more of a "brainer" than I thought it would be to get it onto itunes! And of course, I used my brain delivering the message on Sunday. I suppose that could be open for debate, but I digress.

Such as it is, you can now hear Sunday's message from Compass Church in 4 ways. Download it from our website, download it from the new "Sunday Rewind Podcast" blog, subscribe to it via the "rss" feed there or subscribe to it through itunes.




It took a little effort up front, but now it will be very easy to update every week. We're not even a twinkle in a mega church's eye but now we do have a podcast that's available on itunes. I believe that's important for a lot of reasons, but I'll save those for another post.

And what about the second podcast I talked about in an earlier post? Still working on the name of that one, but it's on its way. I'm really leaning toward calling it the "Double Shot Podcast" of Compass Church. Podcast2 seems a little generic. :)

And yes, before long, the Poor Pastor's Pod Blip will be making an appearance on itunes as well. There are some great comedic possibilities there, and each post is only about a minute long. How could you not subscribe to that? :-D

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Geek alert:
The following info may cause your eyes to glaze over. If so, please keep moving, there's nothing more to see here...
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I'm pretty sure there are simpler ways to create podcasts and get them into itunes but here are the steps I took and the free programs I used ...

1. Create the Podcast from the audio recording of Sunday's message and save or export it as an "mp3" file. I used Audacity to do a quick edit.
2. Create a graphic to use with the podcast. (This isn't really necessary, but cool, nonetheless)
   
3. Publish the file to a host site; in our case, it's on our website.
4. Create a "subscribable" page to update with links to the "mp3" file. I created a free blog with blogger.
5. Create an "rss2.0" feed so that itunes can read it. (Blogger is apparently only making "atom" feeds, now.) I did this fairly simply by using feedburner. In the signup process, there is an option for podcasts that makes it really easy to sign up with itunes.
   
6. Submit the new "rss2.0" feed to itunes.
   
7. About a day later, the podcast is available in itunes.

Of course, you could just go to Odeo or a number of other free sites and upload a file you created using a microphone and a laptop....