Summary
I've been thinking more about podcasting lately, but I haven't done it because I'm too lazy to go through all the steps. Someone must have simplified this!
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I'm now thinking that a good way to start is just to read weblog entries for those people who would like to have them while commuting . Then see how that goes and whether people want more or different kinds of podcasts.
But the process of publishing these things seems too onerous.
I'm hoping there's a service somewhere that allows you to just FTP an MP3 to them, and they take care of serving it and making it available on iTunes and wherever else it makes sense.
What's the good service to use? Does it even exist?
As for just reading blog entries, I tend to find podcasts with three or more people way more interesting than those with just one person doing random talk. If you keep it down to just reading the blog entries then I may even change my mind, as it will be much more well structured - almost like chapters of an e-book.
Have a look at mp3dj. The latest version only takes a minute to install. It requires BlazeDS (turnkey), which includes a Tomcat server, Ant, and a JDK. Installation has boiled down to extracting mp3dj-4.7.zip and saying 'ant' after identifying the directory where your mp3 files live, and where you downloaded the BlazeDS distribution (zip) file.
I know this isn't what you were really asking for. It requires a server accessible from the internet. It also means you need to ensure another Tomcat server gets started when that server is rebooted. Folks would be able to browse, search, and play your collection with no additional work from you.
Let me know if you identify any shortcomings that might be eliminated to make this useful to you.
Check out www.odiogo.com for generating a podcast from a blog. It automatically generates mp3 files and a podcast feed from a blog feed.
Off course the voice will be an electronic voice, but the quality of synthesized audio has improved over the years.
However such tools are not very good at generating sounds for certain words (especially where you are trying to explain code), in which case a human generated audio is far better.
I second what Humberto said. A podcast that has multiple people where each bring their perspectives is much more fun to listen to.
Just reading out your blogs is also a nice idea to start with. I am sure many people would like listening to blogs on their audio players.
Also the Podpress plugin for Wordpress will generate a podcast feed from a Wordpress blog.
I also believe that Feedburner automatically generates a podcast feed from blog posts that have audio attachments.
If you decide to host your Podcast on Libsyn, then I believe they will generate a podcast feed automatically. Sometime back while researching some stuff on podcasting, I was led to believe that LibSyn offers the best hosting for media in terms of quality, bandwidth, and cost.
Some other links that might be of interest to you: 1. http://www.odeo.com - A free podcast host 2. http://www.podango.com - A free podcast host with advertisement revenue sharing
it will be great if teach us Python and Django ........ and we will happily pay you , as you there are no screencasts for Python , i believe you'll be the boss in that .
i think that it's a better business now than just writing books , but please make it pretty , clear and from the start like he did in every thing web sites design HQ videos , HQ sounds , nice and simple tool like TextMate with excellent font and code theme ...... for readability as you believe .
One commercial podcasting service that I've seen used is http://www.libsyn.com ($5/month I think). For example, this site: http://www.unitytemple.org uses it (just broadcast from the web site).
(Web2py doesn't take any installation; just download it from http://www.web2py.com, run, and add the appliance from the admin, above to try, edit, inspect the models / controllers / etc.).
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