 His talk is about how to publish a broadcast using WordPress. Thanks a lot. Yeah, I'll be showing my whole workflow. So we have a bit of tech over here and I hope you enjoy it. But before we start, I got a slide about me. Hi there, I'm Simon. I'm from Germany, as you might hear. I've been a WordPress developer since 2008. So it goes to 11 years now. I work as a senior WordPress developer at Big German Firm, no more fancy WordPress agency, sadly. I've been organizing meetups and WordCamp since 2012. And if there's still free time out for that, I'm blogging and podcasting with and about WordPress. And unfortunately, I learned Latin in school, not French. So I'm pretty sorry about that. You might think, podcast? What? Who of you is an active podcast listener? Well, it's about half. Maybe a bit more than a foot. That's good. That's quite good. For the rest of you who might be asking, what's a podcast? I've got some points for that. Podcasts are series of audio or video files. You can subscribe them via RSS or Atom Feed, but Atom is not working anymore, so don't worry. And in a study conducted by German public television, they called it medium for time sovereign listening, or the more fancy German word, Zeit zu verrehen ist ein Adler. You're welcome. The great benefit for us as producers is we have total freedom of production. There's no time slot we have to fit in as we have at WordCamp for 30 minutes. I can talk for two minutes or 20 hours and put it out there, people can listen to it. I can do interviews, talk to other people. There's a lot of room for my own imagination. The final product will look something like this. Our listeners have apps on their phones, we call them podcatchers, where they can subscribe to feeds and get notified when the episode arrives. So this is the final outcome, but why should we do it? I mean, there's so much more to do, isn't it? There are different angles of viewing it. Some people are doing podcasts for marketing reasons, talking about their products, their own personality. Others do it for monetization, talking about other people's products and doing advertising. Some do it for fame, for a lot of things. And the best motivation is fun. I podcast for fun. I have quite high standards in my production, but in the end I do it for my own amusement. What do you podcast? I podcast about WordPress, actually in German and English. And the most important thing is every topic you can imagine there's a niche for it. You can podcast about knitting or driving bicycles really fast. There will be an audience. I don't say you reach this audience, but somewhere they are hiding it. So let's start in our podcast production at a very basic level with the concept. We have to think about some points. I call them questions to us. It's important if I try to do a set up or try to plan a recording. The first thing to keep in mind is how many people there will be. Because the number of people I want to record is important for the number of microphones. For example, I have a paper. Will the recording be central or remote for a big show? Maybe some people are sitting in a room, others are connected by a skype or something else. And kind of a format, I like that. Is it interview just a couple of folks talking or will it be super high intensity production like an audio feature? The answers for all of these points I can really quickly go out to recording, which is nice because you actually get to do something. And it's nice because I can follow a kind of disease I have. It's called Pia Acquisition Syndrome. Most nerds suffer from it and go like, crazy, we can buy hardware. For those of you who want to follow this path, I fabricated a little shopping list with all the stuff we have to gather to record a podcast. First of all, of course, a microphone because we have to get our sounds into digitalized versions. A recorder or audio interface. Sometimes you need extra headphones and then you need also headphone amplifiers. A couple of cords because they are super, super fun. And a bag or case. In my case, it's this eary. It's super heavy, not a good idea. What's in the case? All the other equipment? All the other equipment that lives inside this case. When I started, I had quite a simple setup. It looked like this. It's a simple USB microphone. We have two guys, each has his own microphone and we're connected via Skype and recorded. You can plug your headphones in there to listen to the other person and your own voice. And it's the perfect way to start if you don't know if podcasting is for you, if you will enjoy it even two months down the road. But quite quickly I realized, okay, that's nice, I like podcasting, but I want more than that. And you wanted to buy more gear? Of course I wanted to buy more gear. So I started shopping and I started with this. It's a headphone, if I have it right here, with a mic integrated. It's quite nice because most American podcasters have a fixed mic and it's on the table. It has its benefits, no doubt. But in my case I thought about, okay, I'll be having interview partners. Don't do this regularly. I don't want them to focus on their distance to the mic and if you have this thing on your head, the mic is always in the same position no matter if you do stuff like this. So if I go somewhere and interview the person, I put these strange mics on their head and they look interesting. Second thing is an audio interface. I have to plug my mic and headphones somewhere quite recorded. I have it inside this case. There it is. In my case I... What's happening? In my case I chose the biggest available version. It's quite a thing and it's heavy and also not a good idea if you're travelling a lot and I'm travelling a lot. You can plug 16 microphones in there. Just in case. I have like three. But it's super nice. I can use FireWire and Thunderbolt Connector to plug it into my Mac if I'm not having the projector in there. And all things connected to this interface will be recorded on my Mac. The headphone amplifier is a convenience thing. It's a really small device and each and every headphone is connected to it. So people I talk to can regulate their own loudness on their headphones. Some people want it a bit louder, some less loud. So it's not for you to tune down the other bit? No, no, it's just a monitor signal. It's not for the recording. I don't want to hear that guy. Exactly. It's a quartz. Quite a lot of them. I have them here but I think you can leave me. And software. Of course. You can use any kind of audio recording software but some of them are specially made for journalistic purposes so speech recording instead of music. Ios Hindenburg, which is surprisingly reliant despite its name, the German community developed an open source thing called Ultraschall, which is sitting on top of a software called Reaper. It's more less expensive. And that's about it in case of recording. After I finish recording my session we come to post-production. And post-production is quite a lot of work, actually. Before I start post-production, my recording looks like this. I have every single interview partner in his own track so I can edit them individually and cut out words or something. And after I finish, these two single tracks have been cut like a thousand times, I spend three to four times the length of the interview for post-production. So for one hour interview I said another four hours before it's done. You don't have to do this. And maybe you shouldn't. I like it if I get all the ums out there and maybe cut some sentences that got wrong but you can just go there and put your whole recording out there. End of that whole life? No, if it's live you can't edit in this. Just like in radio, if there's some music, you could put some music in there. Yeah, you could put music in there but no, it's quite a simple setup and it's not made for live streaming. If you want to stream live you basically have to put out the raw version without editing. Yeah, maybe you could do some kind of a delay and then stream it with a minute of delay. No, just don't. If I'm done with editing I have a single file per track. So it's still a multi-channel thing. Every speaker has its own file and I upload them to a service called Arphonic. Arphonic is awesome. It's basically magic. It's an Austrian company I think. They use fancy kind of machine learning auto-leveling, blah. And what they basically do is look at the audio, level it on the same loudness. It's standardized European and clean the audio. Get rid of humming sounds, popping sounds, strange background noises. They're quite good. And no matter how clean your audio files are they will be amazing after you put them through Arphonic. How much does that service cost? Arphonic is free. It has like a two hour processing time per month free thingy. If you want to do multi-channel productions like I do it starts at 9 euro a month. So it's okay. And you can buy credits. If you know you won't do like 10 hours a month you can buy credits. After this post-production circle you have clean audio files. Clean meaning they're rid of stupid words and crazy sounds. I use Arphonic to render them in different kinds of file formats. I have MP3, AIC, Fluck and OGG because depending on the device you're listening on you sometimes can open MP3 and Fluck being an open source low compression high fidelity audio. It's nice. I also fabricate chapter blocks so my audience can skip different parts of a podcast or if they're looking for something special it's about amp out of there and jump directly to the time I talk about. I quite obsess over show notes so I write a whole blog post about anything I talk about and there are all the links that I'll talk about in the recording as well. And Arphonic provides me with a lot of metadata I currently do not use actually. So they know what's the percentage of time each speaker took speaking at the recording. They know gender. It's quite a lot of stuff Arphonic can analyze. Also I'm experimenting with automatic transcriptions. Google has an AI service for it and there's like two or three others. Transcription is a nice thing with audio because audio is, you can search in audio. You may know there's a podcast talking about newcomers and a special thing in it but you can't find it because you can't do a text search. If it's transcribed you can search in the transcript and find minutes at the recording. Also it's an accessibility feature but automatic transcription is not super good at the moment there is room for improvement. Let's take it that way. And after I'm done with processing and editing stuff it's time for publishing. And because podcasts are published rather than web there's a neat little software for that you might have heard of it. It's called WordPress. Because of the way podcasts are designed, technically designed, they're quite similar to blogs. We have single entries, RSS feeds, there's media involved, there's text involved, etc. So there are three things I'd like to talk about the organic WordPress and podcasts. Three different solutions. First is simple podcasting. It's a Gutenberg blog developed by our friends that turn up. It's a really simple solution. The second is WordPress.com. You could use WordPress.com in the past for podcast publishing but they added a new feature of it there so it got even easier. And the third option is the one I use for my own podcast. It's called Portal of Publisher. It's a quite extensive plugin and it will take a closer look at it. So simple podcasting is just a Gutenberg blog. You can define all your file to be displayed in there and it will add the player. On WordPress.com I never used WordPress.com myself. You can define a feed for your podcast and it will add a subscribe button, etc. And yeah, I'm rushing through these notes and there's the Portal of Publisher. And what could possibly go wrong will do a little live demo. Do you have any questions so far? So this is the interface the Portal of Publisher provides us with. It's basically a custom host type. I can choose a type of fancy podcast. I could add a description over here. I have an episode number I can give. And podlab allows me to add contributors. So I can say, okay in this episode you hear me and this guest and I don't know who else. Then I define the file name. I have a standardized way to do this. So the stuff of phonic renders has the right names and is put in the right place on my server. So this is just go there and grab it. And if I've configured it right I just have to publish and it's done. But because the Portal of Publisher has about 3 million options it's quite hard. It's an extensive, extensive thing. Let's take a look at the settings. There's a lot of metadata in there. I have to get the name of my podcast, subtitle summary, some artwork and the language that's quite important. And then I can do this over and over again for all kinds of topics. All this data is stored inside my RSS feed. So podcast directories like the iTunes directory can go there and grab it from there. They know the author, they know the title. They also know the artwork and stuff. All of these things are stored inside my feed and put there by the Portal of Publisher. I can define the file formats I want to output. I already mentioned those, 3, AC, etc. And each and every file format has its own feed. So you can explicitly go to the feed and select the kind of file you want to use. Portal of also, because it's not in itself complex enough, has a tweak-based template editor. You can go there and do a kind of crazy stuff with your templating. In most cases you won't need custom templates for this. And I already show you can do stuff with contributors and add not only name and avatar, but also gender, social media profiles, donation links, etc. It's quite nice if you do this over a long time and can do some statistics and say, oh, the guest I most often host is my friend Kasper, who's often over there. Or you can say, OK, let's see all the episodes a special person appeared in. It's quite nice, I'm meaner than I think, so I like these guys. And if we did all of these steps in the correct order and completed them actually, we're back in the podcast area and have published our first episode, hopefully. And that's the point we leave this at. But of course it's not the end of a podcast life cycle because you can do a lot of marketing there. You can talk to people at work camps and talk about your podcast life. So thank you very much for listening, even though it was quite late. And are there any questions? Do you have an example of how the podcast is rendered on the website? How the podcast is rendered on the website? Yeah, of course. And the kind of functionality that the end user actually has to interact with it? The podcast... The podcast publisher has its own web player. It knows about the audio files are specified and the web player knows my browser so it can switch the right file type to be used. And as a user it just can hit the play button and play the file. I can go over here and download it in the form that I like to. And also I can share it with whoever I want to share it with. And all these things are configurable in the plugin? Yeah. You can choose things like color and such networks to display. You can change the plugin if you don't like that plugin. Because you are right now uploaded, do you have to re-upload it again? The question is if you can change the plugin? Yeah, without re-uploading. The files are not uploaded directly to WordPress or the publisher. They are somewhere on the FTP server specified. So technically you don't have to re-upload them, but you might want to consider the effects because if you get rid of the product of the publisher also all your feeds go down, etc. So you should be able to switch plugins, especially other podcast plugins, use custom post types as well, but there is quite a lot of stuff to consider. I think very much for the presentation because I thought it was really, really interesting and I wanted to read it. But I don't know if you could tell me if you were talking about marketing. Ah, podcast marketing. Maybe I'll do it next year. It's a huge topic. You can do very lots. I'm sorry I can't answer this in a short time. For the WordPress world there's a lot of Twitter that's quite useful and maybe Facebook sharing. And you can go all the way with printing flyers or something. I don't know, it's quite a lot to do. Thank you. What's the address of your WordPress podcast site? I'm not here for advertisement. I'm curious. It's pressthis.net. Thank you. I think we run out of time. Is it a short question? No, it's not. The link with IT is in the feed. You can add your feed to iTunes. It's a podcast publishing with iTunes. Thank you.