I’ve been looking for ways to add extra pizzazz to my blogs and sites, and I’ve just started using audio and podcasts. Podcasts seem to rank well in SEO. I started by reading a couple of my articles on creating a sound file (using Audacity shareware) and LAME shareware as a .mp3 format converter. Everything was easy to set up. The results were passable, and I quickly learned how to edit/splice the sound files using Audacity (after getting tired of countless takes).
Then I took a closer look at WordPress and found that I couldn’t just load and go. I searched and found a number of articles referring to WordPress plugins like Cool Player and Anarchy Media Player. I didn’t feel like setting up yet another plugin, with the attendant danger of the software becoming unsupported, etc. (lorelle’s WordPress blog was very informative).
So, I got to thinking. I had just published a podcast on Podbean and was wondering if I could make use of that. And I did, although it seems to only work on WordPress blogs that are not hosted on WordPress.
That is how:
1. Log in to your Podbean account and locate the required podcast in the My Dashboard/Manage tab.
2. Below the ‘Play Now’ buttons you should see a rectangular Audio MP3 button. Next to this is a list of options underlined with dashes.
3. Click the ‘Embeddable Player’ option and copy (ctrl+c) the script code into the box. Currently there is only a choice of two button colors. I took a look at the html code and couldn’t see a quick way to change the button theme colors.
3. Now, create your WordPress blog post, with appropriate text, just a brief summary of what’s in the Podcast. My preference is to include the full text of the article/post and offer the Audio option:
‘In a hurry? Don’t have time to read this great post? Press the Podbean button and listen while you do something else!’
4. Next, paste the Podbean script where you want it in your post (make sure you have the html view of the post). I prefer to put it at the beginning, as you don’t want people to read your post and then find out that they might have heard it (although it depends on the content, whether it’s pure entertainment or information).
That’s it – just publish/update your WordPress post and the button will be active.
The good thing is that the button is turned off in the RSS feed of the blog and is accessible in the feed reader (I use feedburner, so I haven’t tried any others) – the button displays correctly and works as it should.
This technique also works on Blogger.
So that’s it, it looks good, it works good, but it doesn’t always match the theme colors!
(c) Phil Marks 2010