So I recorded and released a podcast today. It had been brewing in my mind for a while, at least since I heard the running episode of Get up and code.
For some reason Merlin Mann and Back to work came up very frequently in my mind when thinking about what I would say and how. To me, the topic of running and what I wanted to say about it felt distinctly Back to work-ish: trying to cut through frequently stated things and nailing down or at least flailing hopefully for something a little purer and clearer. So, Merlin-land, and I could very often hear things spoken in Merlin's voice as I was preparing notes and thinking about what I wanted to get across. Something like that can be a very good mind trick to get thoughts flowing, it certainly worked well for me this time.
I am not sure how much that comes through in the result for anyone but me. Possibly because, as it turns out, I am not Merlin. To me, the result sounds quite a bit like David Smith of Developing perspective, which is amusing and totally unexpected.
Eventually, I amassed about 1500 words worth of notes and figured I had better record something before I either gathered too much of a mess or turned it too much into a full-fledged and distinctly non-spoken article.
Recording went pretty well. I am both pretty happy with how it came out, and in full understanding of how much I have to learn when it comes to the art of talking to myself. Kodsnack has taught me a lot about podcasting, but being alone in both preparing and talking makes it another thing, much closer to a presentation of some type. I am looking forward to deepening my skills whenever I get the chance.
Editing was Kodsnack but easier. One track with one person saves a lot of time.
The last stage of the adventure was all new though: publishing a podcast by myself in some way. I decided to see what it would take to just put it here on my site, and so headed off to read Apple's documentation on publishing podcasts, cutting, pasting and checking with Feed validator. Turns out I could paste together all I needed (including a passable image for cover art) by hand, so now everything is in place and all I am waiting for is iTunes to publish the podcast feed so I can add a link for that too.
The one bonus feature was figuring out how to get show notes nicely into the feed. By looking at the feed for Back to work I learned about the content:encoded tag. Then, I just had to turn my markdown notes into HTML, encode that and paste it inside the tag.
Yes, I did all the RSS and other things by hand for now. It was a nice little learning experience. Of course, if I start publishing podcasts regularly I would figure out a simple way of automating a bit, but it is rarely wasted time to learn what the bare essentials for doing something by hand are even if you automate them away eventually.
Oh, automation
It is starting to take a few moments to bake this site now. I guess it will be time to implement some kind of (not even remotely) smart gradual baking soon …