Earlier this week, I decided to start a podcast series around Windows Live. For those of you who aren't familiar with podcasting, there are plenty of resources on the web that can tell you all about it, ranging from how to best record your audio (or video), edit it, host it, and syndicate it using RSS. One of the best explanations comes from Common Craft who do these awesome videos:
Common Craft Video Explaining Podcasting:
It all looks so easy. Or so I thought.
I thought it would be a simple matter of uploading my audio files to SkyDrive, linking to them in a Spaces blog post, and the resulting Spaces RSS feed would "automagically" transform these linked files into enclosed files. It didn't quite work out that way. It turns out that neither the RSS feeds from Spaces or from SkyDrive do this automagical thing I wanted.
So here's how I got it to work anyway, with a little help from some extra stuff and a little manual effort. This is a bit of a long post, so you might want to grab a cup of coffee.
Part 1: Store Your Audio Files on SkyDrive
This is the easy part. Record your audio files and then put them up on a public folder in SkyDrive. I've decided to create a folder for all my podcasts, and the put each podcast (in both WMA and MP3 formats) in separate folders:
Part 2: Create your RSS feed(s)
I decided to create two feeds, one for people that want WMA formatted audio and one for people that want MP3 instead. You can "hand craft" your RSS feed using a text editor like Notepad to build the XML file, but I found a great little app called FeedForAll that helps you build the files. It's free to try and a nominal fee to register (which I've paid gladly!). I won't describe all the features of the product and how to use them here. It's fairly easy to figure out.
However, I do want to give you a couple important tips when using FeedForAll.
Make sure you provide a good link to your blog entries about your podcasts in the main Feeds tab and the Items tab (Feeds tab shown below):
This is the link people could click on to read more about your podcast versus listening to it. I actually decided to link to my RSS feed of all my podcast blog entries.
Second, when you start creating the items in the feed, paste in the URL for the actual audio file (not just the icon file display in SkyDrive). Get the playable URL by right clicking on the file in SkyDrive and copying the shortcut.
To better explain, click on these two URLs to see what happens:
Make sure you strip off the "?download" part of the second URL before you paste it into FeedForAll. An example entry is shown below:
Now, get the exact length of the file to enter in the FeedForAll window shown above, call up the properties of that file from wherever you have it stored on your main hard drive (before you uploaded it to SkyDrive). An example properties window is shown at right. Notice how the file size above and the file size to the right are the same 8887026 bytes.
Repeat this same process for all the items (audio files) you want to include in your podcast feed.
Part 3: Storing Your RSS Feed XML Files On-Line
After you create your RSS feeds, you need to store them on-line. These are the little XML gems that are going to be the key for your subscribers. You have a couple options here.
You could put them to your public folder on SkyDrive. This is okay if you have a set of items in your feed and you're not going to be adding any new items to that feed.
If you are planning to add new items to the feed over time, I found out SkyDrive isn't a workable option. The reason is the next time you upload the new XML file to SkyDrive, it creates a new file identifier that will be inside the actual URL link which basically creates a new feed and would require a new subscription. Your old feed becomes an orphan.
So if you do plan to continue to add files over time (and most podcasters do), you'll need to find a new place to put your files. Fortunately, Microsoft has another option you can try. You can use Microsoft Office Live Small Business to create a quick website and upload files to that website. Here is the way that looks inside the administration tools of Microsoft Office Live Small Business:
If you have another on-line storage option, you can use that instead. Just make sure the XML file is displayed as a feed when you click on it, and not some file icon representation.
Part 4: Doing the Blog Post in Spaces
OK, you're almost there. The final step is doing a blog post in Spaces, and including the links to these new XML files you just posted.
If you use SkyDrive, make sure the URLs to post should be the actual links and not just the links to the icon display of the file in SkyDrive. This is exactly the same as what you did to get the right URLs for the audio files themselves. For example:
If you have your XML file stored some where else (like my Office Live Small Business example above), just make sure (again) that the URL shows the actual feed and not just an icon link to the file.
Now anyone can click on that feed, subscribe to it, and they'll have your podcast files included as enclosures. When you add new audio files, just add them as new items to your RSS feeds and repost those XML files back up on your on-line storage location. Remember, if you use SkyDrive and repost your XML files, you're creating a brand new feed which will be problematic for all the reasons discussed above.
It's not automagical, but it's not very hard either!
Good luck building your own podcasts,
- Marcus
P.S. I'm talking with the SkyDrive and Spaces teams about how we can make their RSS feeds include enclosures, so maybe this will become automagical in the future.
