Behind The Blog

How can you add support for podcasting, and specifically video podcasting to a WordPress MU (WPMU) installation? That was the question I set out to answer… and here are some thoughts on the process I went through.

If you follow the main Voxeo blog site, you’ll undoubtedly know that not terribly long ago I launched a video podcast called Emerging Tech Talk (ETT) where I am posting videos related to “emerging technology” and more specifically “emerging communication technology”. Essentially it is a place for me to tell stories in a video form around the technologies that I am investigating and using as part of my job within Voxeo’s Office of the CTO.

The challenge I had in setting it up was how to set the podcast up so that viewers could subscribe via iTunes and yet I wanted to ideally not install yet-another plugin. Having been involved with podcasting since early 2005, I was well aware that the PodPress plugin was out there and well-loved by WordPress users. However, at this point I’m seriously trying to minimize the number of plugins I install purely because each time I have to upgrade WordPress MU, I have to check compatibility with all the plugins – and that’s more work than I wanted to do.

So here’s how the story unfolded…

YOUTUBE ONLY – When I started ETT, I initially posted the videos only to our YouTube channel. This was admittedly largely due to the fact that iMovie ‘08 has this insanely simple “Share -> YouTube… menu option. Create your movie, make the menu choice, enter your password and other info and… ta da… iMovie goes off and does all the necessary rendering and uploading to YouTube. However, I knew that this would NOT give me an RSS feed that was compatible with iTunes due to the fact that YouTube uses Flash video for their videos and iTunes needs MP4 (.m4v).

RSSHANDLER – In looking around for solutions, a friend pointed me to RSSHandler.com, a site that offers several tools related to making videos accessible in RSS feeds, including a YouTube channel converter that will take your YouTube channel and turn it into an iTunes-compatible RSS feed with the videos converted to the appropriate formats. I tried this out and it did work (although I admit I still don’t know how it worked as well as it did – at some point I’d like to dig into it a bit more to understand what it does). There was only one problem – I didn’t want to convert the entire YouTube channel. Our YouTube channel has my Emerging Tech Talk episodes, but also other videos we put up there. I wanted a feed with only the ETT videos. Now I could have created a separate YouTube channel for just the ETT shows, and I debated about doing this for a while. Doing so would help build the “brand” for the show. In the end, though, I decided that I wanted to keep all the Voxeo video content in one place on YouTube… so I abandoned this RSSHandler.com approach.

FEEDBURNER AND “SMARTCAST” – Since I already used FeedBurner to gather stats on users of my RSS feeds, my next attempt was to use FeedBurner’s “SmartCast” feature to turn an ordinary RSS feed into a podcast feed complete with all the iTunes-required tags. To make this work, I had to start uploading the video files to another web site (i.e. I couldn’t use the versions in YouTube) and so I started uploading them to a directory on the blog server. So now for each episode I’m doing two uploads: one to YouTube and one to the blog server. I also had to add a “download” link to each ETT blog post and had a link to the video file.

Unfortunately, FeedBurner’s “SmartCast” turned out not to be so smart in may case and despite whatever I did the RSS feed continued to pick up the links to the YouTube Flash video files. And yes, I of course tried 'rel="enclosure"' in the appropriate <A> tag… and I put it at the beginning of the entry and also at the end. Nothing worked. I had to turn off SmartCast and return the feed to a “normal” feed.

PODPRESS – You probably know what’s coming… yes, indeed, in the end I did have to suck it up and install the PodPress plugin. Installed it into my plugins directory, went through WPMU Site Admin to make the plugin available, and then in the ETT blog enabled the plugin and configured it appropriately. Even though PodPress is for the standalone version of WordPress, I had no issues using it in WordPress MU.

It works great… I do have to do the dual uploads to both YouTube and our site, but in the end I have a podcast feed that works great with iTunes and presumably any other podcast receiving software.

There are a couple of interesting points about putting up a video podcast in this manner:

DUAL UPLOADS – As I mentioned, I do have to upload the video file to both YouTube and this site. My primary reason for doing that is that I want the video content to be found in YouTube. If I didn’t care about having the content be found in YouTube, I could skip that upload and just have the upload going from our site. But I do want these videos contributing to our YouTube presence and being able to be found there. Having them in YouTube also means they are very easily embeddable in another blog site, linked to, etc.

STATISTICS – The good news, I guess, is that because the video files are being pulled directly from our site, we can get statistics here on the number of downloads. The bad news is that we’ve now got fractured download counts between our site and YouTube. The number of potential viewers is now the number of downloads plus the number of YouTube views.

ONLINE POST CREATION – A downside for me, personally, to using PodPress is that now I can’t create the ETT blog posts entirely offline. I do pretty much all my blog writing using an offline blog editor (MarsEdit, in my case) and then just hit “Send to Weblog” and the posts are uploaded to the blog site. Now, with PodPress in the production loop, I can write the post offline, but when I send it to the ETT blog I have to make sure that the Post Status is set to “Draft”. This uploads to blogs.voxeo.com but doesn’t make it publicly visible. I then login to our site, go into the draft post and then configure the PodPress options to point to the media file, etc. I then “Publish” the post at which point it is visible and also goes out in the RSS feed. It’s not a huge deal, but it just does add another step to the publishing process.

In the end, I have a working platform on WordPress MU for publishing video podcasts, which could also be used, of course, for audio podcasts (Stay tuned! )

Over time I expect to still be investigating other options for doing all this, but at the moment I’ve got something that works and lets us get our content out in audio and video forms. (Suggestions for other mechanisms are of course welcome.)

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