Plugins 002 – 7 Minutes on Blubrry Powerpress Podcasting Plugin

This is a shortened version of episode 1 covering the Blubrry Powerpress podcasting plugin. We will try to keep all episodes under 15 minutes for now on, sorry all. šŸ™‚

Blubrry Powerpress is a lightweight WordPress plugin that adds only the essential features to your WordPress blog to turn it into a podcasting system. Below are some key features.

  • Easily add podcast episodes to blog posts and pages
  • Integrated audio/video media player
  • iTunes RSS tags and album over art
  • Podcast only RSS feed
  • iTunes Ping
  • Media size detection and duration in seconds detection for mp3s
  • 3rd party statistics integration

In addition to the core fetureas above, the plugin has the ability to easily import Podpress episodes and settings so users can easily migrate switch plugins.

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Plugins 001 – Blubrry Powerpress Podcasting Plugin

Tonight’s episode I’m covering the Blubrry Powerpress podcasting plugin.

Blubrry Powerpress is meant to be a very lightweight plugin to add only the essential features to your wordpress blog to turn it into a podcasting system. Below are some key features.

  • Easily add podcast episodes to blog posts and pages
  • Integrated audio/video media player
  • iTunes RSS tags and album over art
  • Podcast only RSS feed
  • iTunes Ping
  • Media size detection and duration in seconds detection for mp3s
  • 3rd party statistics integration

In addition to the core fetureas above, the plugin has the ability to easily allow Podpress (an older WordPress podcasting plugin) users to easily migrate to Blubrry Powerpress. In this episode Angelo will explain how this works and what steps to take in case you decide to revert back to Podpress.

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Pinging Web Logs and Updating Services in WordPress

Today I gave a friend my list of web logs I like to ping. If you’re not familiar with pinging as far as blogging is concerned, it is a method for your blog to let other web blog directories know that you’ve published a new post. If you don’t ping sites to let them know you have new content, then your post will not get picked up until a web crawling app crawls your site. I personally like things to be instant, which is why I love weblog pings.

In WordPress, these ping sites are saved in a field titled Updating Services. Each Service (or weblog, as I like to call it) URL is entered on a new line. Here’s my list of weblogs I currently ping when I publish a new post.

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rssrpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://odeo.com/api/xmlrpc/1.0/ping

Pingomatic.com one is the default value. Technorati.com, weblogs.com andĀ blogsearch.google.com I believe are the most important sites to ping. I still include some others as you see above to get the most bang for my ping.

You can learn more about this topic on the Update Services page on wordpress.org.

What sites do you ping and why?

Welcome to Plugins: The WordPress Plugins Podcast

Welcome to Plugins, The WordPress Plugins Podcast.

The Plugins Podcast aims to cover one WordPress plugin each week with occasional interviews of plugin developers as well as with heavy plugin users. Normal episodes will aim to be between 10-15 minutes in mp3 format.

This podcast is hosted by Angelo Mandato, a seasoned software programmer, web developer and network administrator. Angelo’s currently the CIO of RawVoice, the company behind the Blubrry Podcasting Community. He’s been working with PHP since the Winter of 2000 and started using WordPress for his personal blog since April of 2005. Angelo’s developed 4 WordPress plugins, 2 of which are publicly available: Subscribe Sidebar and Blubrry Powerpress.

If you have plugin suggestions, comments or would like to be interviewed on the show, please E-mail pluginspodcast [at] gmail (dot) com.

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