EDAD660 (2010)

In class I mentioned that a podcast is nothing more than an RSS feed that contains at least one link to an audio file.  Once you have created an MP3 file using Audacity (see this tutorial) you can easily use your blog to create your own podcast.  Here’s how:

1. Open up your blog’s dashboard
2. Create a new post
3. Give your post a title
4. Click on the ‘Add Audio’ button
5. Upload your MP3 file
6. When this finishes, click on the ‘File URL’ button and then click on ‘Insert into Post’
7. A hyperlink should appear in your post.

That’s it!  People can now use the RSS feed for your blog to subscribe to your podcast.  The feed URL is usually located at the bottom of the page, but if it is missing you can add it back in by enabling the ‘Meta’ widget.

Keep in mind that podcasts created in this way have a few limitations, including:

1. At most, you can only have one audio file per post
2. WordPress limits the maximum size of file uploads.  Currently this is set to 5mb on globalblogs.org

If you want people to be able to play your MP3 file without having to subscribe to your podcast feed you can provide a MP3 player directly on your post.  Here’s how:

1. Make sure that your post is published
2. Visit your post and right-click on your audio file – copy the URL to the file
3. Visit this widgetbox page:  http://www.widgetbox.com/widget/mp3-player
4. Paste the URL into the ‘Music URL’ box
5. Click ‘Get Widget’
6. Copy the embed code and post it into your blog post as HTML

An RSS “feed” is an XML file that is designed to separate the content of a website from it’s graphical design, which allows the “meat” of a website to be easily used by other sites and programs. RSS feeds are everywhere, and most organizations now offer them as part of their online presence – just visit your favorite sites and look for the following icon:

RSS Logo

How can you use a feed?

Once you have found a feed you need to a program called an “aggregator” which has the ability to read and analyze RSS feeds. There are many different aggregators available, and two are readily accessible to TCNJ faculty members (Zimbra & SOCS). Here are some general directions on how to use a feed in either one of these systems:

Step 1: Obtain a feed

Let’s say that you’d like to get the top news stories from CNN and have them delivered to your e-mail via Zimbra or make them available to your students via SOCS. Here’s how you can do this:

1. Visit the CNN homepage and looking for the RSS Feed icon. Click on this icon.
2. Next you will be presented with a listing of different feeds or “channels.” Find the “top stories” channel and copy the feed (right click and choose “copy link”)

Step 2: Paste the feed into an Aggregator

Next you need to tell your aggregator program that you’d like to “subscribe” to a feed. There are tons of aggregators out there – here’s a short listing of ones we talked about in class.

1. Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader/): One of my favorite web-based RSS aggregators, Google Reader comes as part of the free Google account. Google Reader gives you the ability to not only subscribe to feeds but also share them with your friends, take notes of items of particular interest, access statistcs about the sites you visit most often as well as browse for new feeds that may be of interest to you.
2. iGoogle (http://www.google.com/ig): More of a “portal” than an aggregator, iGoogle gives you the ability to create a customized “home page” that you can use to organize Internet content that you visit most often. Included in this tool is the ability to import RSS feeds for easy viewing.
3. Your blog can also act as an aggregator – you can add an RSS feed by logging into your Dashboard, clicking on Appearance -> Widgets and then adding an ‘RSS Widget’ to your sidebar.

Creating your own feeds

1. Google News (http://news.google.com/): Google News allows you to access news from around the world in a variety of formats, including RSS feeds. The site even allows you to create your own customized news feed based on your own search terms. Say you were interested in “TCNJ” and “Science” – you could use Google News to create a feed that would search popular news sources, blogs, etc. for these search terms and return to you an up to the minute RSS feed of related stories.
2. National Public Radio (NPR) (http://www.npr.org/): NPR maintains an enormous number of RSS news feeds along with podcast versions of most of their syndicated shows. Recently they added a new feature to their site which allows visitors to “mix” their own podcasts using their custom keywords.
3. Yahoo! Pipes (http://pipes.yahoo.com/): Yahoo! Pipes is a tool that allows you to “rewire” the Internet. Using drag and drop “blocks,” visitors can create their own informaiton “machines” that sift through content from multiple sources and “mash” them up into a final product. For example, you could use Pipes to gather information from 3 RSS feeds, extract only stories that match a certain keyword and then output these results to a Google Map to visually see where the stories are taking place. Pipes is a powerful tool and is more geared towards the intermediate to advanced skill set.