Last week I posted about listening to audiobooks, sermons, lectures and interviews from around the internet. As I mentioned, there are a heap of resources to consume. And that is a problem. How do you whittle down what you do and don’t want to listen to? How do you keep up the preaching of several preachers and audiobooks and lectures and interviews?
I don’t think you can, but here is how you can create your own podcast with whatever you want in it from around the web.
The concept is simple – rather than subscribing to five or ten different podcast RSS feeds, use the technology freely available to create your own single podcast feed tailored to your own desires and interests.
I’ve been doing this for several months and find that I’m able to pick and choose the best and the bits that I’m interested in and ignore most of the rest. You can take a look at what I’ve done at http://audiotrain.darrylburling.com to see what the final result looks like.
I’m assuming you are using iTunes for your podcasting, but if you aren’t you probably know how to substitute iTunes instructions for whatever you are using.
1. You need somewhere to put these on the internet, so go and sign up for a free wordpress.com account by filling in the form. Remember that you will be the only one referring to it, so what it looks like, etc doesn’t really matter.
2. You need something to post. When you’ve found something you want to listen to, grab the link to the mp3 file. This can be a bit tricky.
- Some people use a short link which won’t work (example at bottom of this post). In this case, click through to see where it leads and grab the link from the address bar of the browser:
- Others will provide a link directly to the audio file (much easier) in which case you can normally right click on the link and choose “Copy Link Address” or “Copy Shortcut” to get the link
- Make sure you get the .mp3 link or this won’t work properly. Some blogs do their best to hide the link, so this can be tricky. In some cases you may have to subscribe to that podcast directly in iTunes.
There is another tip later in this post that simplifies this a bit.
3. Create a new post in WordPress, give it a title that is meaningful (I tend to use the name of the speaker and the subject), and paste the link to the mp3 file in the body of the post. Hit the publish button to make the post go live.
4. Open iTunes and from the Advanced menu choose subscribe to podcast. Enter the address of your blog on wordpress with “/feed” after it (e.g. http://mysite.wordpress.com/feed). You should now see the podcast in the podcasts section of iTunes. If you don’t have a “Podcasts” section, go into the iTunes preferences and make sure that Podcasts is selected in the library (on the general tab).
Now as you add new audio files to your blog to listen to, you should see them pop up in iTunes automatically.
How do you find things to post?
There are, I’m sure, several ways to stay on top of all the audio that is available. I use Google Reader to track RSS subscriptions to podcast feeds (such as Desiring God, Apologetics315, John MacArthur, etc) and rather than adding each RSS subscription to iTunes, pick the ones I want from Google Reader (which will generally provide you with the direct link) and add them to my podcast.
The benefit of this is that it allows you to listen to a variety of audio options without having to be tied directly to all of them. There are some I still subscribe directly to because I want to listen to all of the episodes, but there are many that I want to listen to just some of. This solution works great for those.
Comments are closed.