heyamaretto’s posterous

I love podcasting.

My first podcasts weren't really podcasts, just recordings that I made and uploaded to a website in the late 90's so that other people could listen to them. Unlike the podcasts we know and love today, there was no way to subscribe to all of the episodes that I recorded. When podcasting as we know it hit the world in 2004, I started hosting podcasts through one of my companies.

Despite creating two long-running podcasts between 2004 and 2007, I finally gave up because of the time involved. Part of the problem was due to me being a stickler for perfection in my podcasts, while the rest was due to the fact that I was stuck with podcasting when I was near my iMac and could edit and update a feed file on a regular basis.

Earlier this month, I decided that I wanted to start up a personal podcast again. Yeah, I talk about tech, but for the most part I wanted this to be a free-form podcast that could talk about photography one day, music the next, and the joys of being a cat owner the third. Since my calendar is already pretty well jammed, the only way I was going to be able to commit to doing a podcast every day was to get the podcast workflow down to as little time as possible.

I started experimenting with fast and furious podcasting. I wanted to be able to podcast if I just had a few spare minutes, which meant that I generally wouldn't be near my computer for most of the process. That meant that I was going to need to use my iPhone 3GS as a recorder. I wanted to do the show in one shot with as little editing as possible, so I was going to have to use a script as often as I could. I wanted to let users subscribe to the podcast through iTunes, which meant that it had to have a compatible feed file available. And frankly, I wanted to do this without spending money.

This took a few easy steps. I set up a blog on Posterous. It's free, I could use an existing domain name that I had registered, and I can email my blog entries and podcast audio files to an email address to post them. Posterous sends out a Tweet when I make a blog posting, so listeners are automatically alerted to jump on the latest episode. Podcasts need a really good feed file -- better than the one that is provided by Posterous -- so I set up a FeedBurner account to grab the RSS feed from the blog and add the other tags that are required or helpful for listing in iTunes. I checked the RSS feed for errors using FeedValidator. Finally, I submitted the new podcast to iTunes and waited for the news that it was accepted.

I call the result "guerilla podcasting," since it's a small team (me and my iPhone) taking on the world with short and hopefully sweet podcasts. Follow along for my process for doing fast and dirty podcasting with a minimum of cost and equipment:

Very cool use of iTunes- hope to try it out with our radio show