Today's Quick Tip comes courtesy of WordPress media expert Jason Tucker. oEmbeds allow WordPress users to easily embed content from 3rd party sites such as YouTube and Vimeo by simply pasting the url of the video in the WordPress post…
This a guest post by my friend and multimedia WordPress wizard, Jason Tucker. He streams live and archives the OC WordPress meetup group, and has recently launched a new Google Hangout and podcast show called WP Watercooler which you can watch live on Mondays at 11am PST, or you can catch the archive on the website and download the podcast via iTunes. He kindly agreed to share some of his wisdom here. Now over to Jason……
****
So you want to learn how to podcast? In this post I’ll go over some of the basics of podcasting using WordPress, a mic and some audio or video recording software.
Before I get into how to start your own podcast I think we should define what a podcast is. Wikipedia states the following:
A podcast is a type of digital media consisting of an episodic series of audio, video, PDF, or ePub files subscribed to and downloaded through web syndication or streamed online to a computer or mobile device. The word is a neologism derived from “broadcast” and “pod” from the success of the iPod, as podcasts are often listened to on portable media players.
So, in plain English, a podcast is a way for you to receive and then consume typically audio or video in an episodic fashion. I listen to quite a few podcasts – some are news focused, and others are either short stories or very long shows. I’ve listened to podcasts that are 5 minutes long all the way to 2 hours long. Either way, think of a podcast as setting a DVR to receive a show someone records and makes available at various intervals, typically every week.
I attended my first WordCamp this weekend and had a great time listening to some info-filled presentations and mingling with my fellow nerds. :)
Here’s some nuggets I gleaned from the day….enjoy.
WordPress will soon run the world. Their other products include:
bbPress – lightweight, WP-style forum
BuddyPress – social network in a box
BackPress – shared code library for WordPress and bbPress
WordPress MU – allows for multi-blog management i.e. you can allow users of your site set up their own WP blogs on your site. A common misconception is that MU is designed for those who have several of their own blogs they’d like to manage from one dashboard – not true! If this is your situation you need a plugin like WP-Hive to make your life easier. WP MU currently uses a lot of server resources so it’s probably not great for shared hosting accounts.
Matt Cutts is a blogger and head of Google’s Webspam team. On his blog he gives a lot of great information regarding SEO and ranking well in Google. He gave a fairly in-depth talk at this year’s Wordcamp San Francisco, basically about how awesome WordPress is for SEO purposes. The video of his talk was just made available. Watch it below. If you are just starting out with WordPress it gets quite detailed at times, but there’s some great info here.
