Blog consulting, podcasts, and flash mp3 WordPress plugins

Posted by stuart as , , , , ,

Well this is just too wierd!

After Ashleigh’s recent posts about blog consulting to businesses, I received a phone call yesterday morning, from a friend of one of my existing clients, looking for me to produce the following:

A blog, where he can upload mp3’s (he does a podcast). He will make a new post in the blog every time he has a new podcast, linking to the mp3. He also wants an “inline” mp3 player in the blog posts, so that a visitor can click a link, an listen to the podcast “streaming” directly from within the blog post. The podcast also needs to be in a format which will be picked up by ITunes.

I’m assuming that the whole ITunes podcast thing works off some sort of RSS feed, and I believe that feedburner offer this service, so I’ll have to look more into that.

So I’m thinking that it will go something like this:

1. Client creates mp3 file
2. Client opens up a page on his website which will allow him to upload the file to a pre-determined directory. (I’m thinking af finding an AJAX script to do this,as they can have progress meters etc). I’m also thinking that this page needs to be password protected, I’ll probably just use .htaccess to do this.
3. Client creates a new post in his blog, with a link to the file. As far as playing the files “inline”, I believe that there are a few Flash players that do this within the actual blog post. If anybody has any suggestions as to players they have been successful with, I’d love to hear about it.
4. ITunes is pinged automatically, letting it know that there is a new mp3 to place in its list. (Not sure how this will work, but I reckon if Feedburner are taking care of it, it probably won’t be that hard)

So it all looks do-able, if anybody has any suggestions as to tools to use to acheive any of these objectives, I’d love to hear from you.