How I Use Archive.org To Podcast For Free - Quick & Dirty Edition

I produce a podcast for my Power Word: Gold blog called (unsurprisingly) The Power Word: Gold Podcast.

I was asked by another blogger wanting to start a podcast for any advice. I've decided to share my response to them with all of you in hope that it might help point you in the right direction if you are thinking about getting into podcasting and are looking for a completely free podcast hosting solution.

Read on past the jump for more.

UPDATED NOTE: Sometime in 2013 archive.org started providing its mp3 links as "https://" (which is a secure encrypted URL). At the time I noticed I had problems with iTunes seeing the MP3 links. I then removed the "s" from the MP3's "https://..." URL to make them "http://..." links. This seems to have solved the issue with iTunes not properly seeing the MP3.

I now remove the "s" from all the "https://" links (http is just the unencrypted version of the URL and it works just fine) for my shows and use that "http://" link when I link show MP3s on my posts.

If you've experienced iTunes not "seeing" your MP3 try manually changing your archive.org MP3 URL from "https://" to "http://" for use in your posts etc.

Quick & Dirty

What I will be detailing below is a rough outline on how to host your podcast for free on Archive.org as well as how to get a podcast-specific RSS feed set up with Feedburner to be able to submit to iTunes.

I won't be going into intricate detail on each step in this post (hence quick & dirty). If you get hung up along the way feel free to leave a comment or email my at jimyounkin@gmail.com and I might be able to give you more detail.

Below is the response I gave to the questions about any advice for getting started podcasting. The person asking the question was using an all Mac setup. I use an all PC setup.

Recording/Editing

I use a PC for my podcasting. For recording alone and editing I use an old $99 version of Sony Vegas. On a Mac GarageBand is probably the (free) way to go.

For recording Skype calls I use Call Graph which is free but I think may be PC-only. I like Call Graph because it records myself on one stereo channel and my guest on the other.

This allows me to edit our sound separately. I do this by duplicating the audio track and making one track left channel only and the other right channel only.

This allows me to turn me up or them down or adjust the EQ on each of us separately. More importantly this allows me to take out unwanted background sounds and/or things like coughs and odd noises out.

There might be a similarly free Mac program for recording Skype on Mac but don't have a need so I can't recommend one.

As for hosting the podcast I use Archive.org which is free. I found this post on using Archive.org to host a podcast and used it to get the basics. Not everything in the post applies to me as I didn't need to use Wordpress for example because I wanted to use my current blogger.com blog.

Podcast-Specific RSS Feed

As far as submitting it to iTunes I needed a Podcast-only RSS feed. The way I accomplished this was tagging the podcast posts with a specific "podcasts" tag in blogger and then using a tag-specific RSS feed.

The nomenclature for a tag-specific RSS feed looks like this:

http://www.powerwordgold.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/Podcasts

In the above example "Podcasts" is the tag you use for all the podcast posts.

Once I had the podcast post tag-specific RSS feed I used that in Feedburner to burn a new feed and use Feedburner's "SmartCast" feature and options under the "Optimize" tab.

Once you have your new podcast-specific RSS feed which may look something like this:

 http://feeds.feedburner.com/PowerWordGoldPodcast

Once you have this RSS feed it should only be pulling in posts that are tagged with the blogger tag you chose ("Podcasts" in my example"). This allows you to run your podcast posts right along with all your other blog posts but still have the podcast-specific posts split off and funneled into iTunes.

Submitting Podcast RSS To iTunes

To learn more about actually submitting your podcast-specific RSS feed to iTunes you can read more from Apples official "Making a Podcast". That is the page I followed when setting up my feed in Feedburner.

Raw Link Supersition

This only thing after that that I do (although I've never "not" done this so it may not be necessary) is include a raw link to the Archive.org hosted mp3 at the bottom of all my posts.

I read somewhere that you needed to do this and although I include a link to the MP3 further up in the podast episode posts I've always added a raw MP3 link at the bottom because it has always worked and I don't want to mess with something that works.

You can see an example of my MP3 link as well as my raw MP3 link at the bottom of this post.

Another Option

That should get you all set up for running a podcast right inside your current blog. Another option that some people find easier is instead of using blog tags and blog tag-specific RSS feeds is that they create a new blog specifically for the podcast and only post podcast episodes.

They then use the RSS feed from that new blog and put that into Feedburner as mentioned above. I don't like that option because I like all my regular blog readers to also see the Podcasts and I've obviously figured out a way to get it to work just fine running inside my blog.

More Advice

The only other advice I'd give is to wait until about episode 3 of your podcast to submit your podcast to iTunes. You can give people your podcast-specific RSS feed early but after episode 3 you should be fairly confident that you'll continue your podcast and can feel comfortable adding it to iTunes.

Also after submitting it to iTunes it may take a while to show up so check and wait until it shows up before telling people.

Blogger.com/iTunes Quirks

The only other quirk I'd mention is that iTunes seems to take blogger.com's last edited date as it's date for the order of the podcasts in iTunes.

What this means is that if you go back and edit a podcast post later it may end up showing up out of order in iTunes as iTunes feels it is the newest episode because it is the most recently edited episode.

Basically if you can help it don't go back and do a lot of editing of old podcast posts if you don't want them to be listed out of chronological order.

I'm sure that is a bit more than you were asking for but I thought I'd share what I've learned over the last nearly 2 years doing the podcast.