Adventures in Podcasting

This definitely goes as a Manic Monday post… since it made most of my waking hours on Sunday (into Monday), well, MANIC. (To put it nicely).

Back in August or September, I volunteered to put together a podcast for Broad Universe. It seemed simple enough. I mean, I KNEW there would be a reasonable amount of work in making it happen, and I was good with that.

In fact, I'm loving most of it!

I enjoy organizing, keeping people on the time table, recording the intros, outros, etc.

In general, I love learning new things.

As an added bonus, I get to hear these fabulous snippets from the other Broads.

What I hadn't entirely been planning for was the issues regarding hosting. The Catch-22 of free Podcast hosting seems to be that for the hosting site to be easy to use, it has to have space issues. If you don't want space issues (or other issues), you need super-special-ninja-tech skills to get it to work.

Or, you have to pay. Which I had not planned on doing, nor is it in the Broad Universe budget (or my own!) for me to pay to host our episodes somewhere.

After fighting for a good 4 hours with mypodcast.com, I am trying out podbean.com, where Morven hosts her podcast.

The problem with mypodcast.com, as I'm inferring based on the forums, is that the group was entirely unprepared for the memory or bandwith or something like that because for this second episode (we're updating once a month), I was told I needed to change it from 128 kmb… something or another… to 96 of that. (i.e. make it smaller). However, when I changed the size, the file was unreadable. After a lot of help from friends, like Dan Kupka, Morven Westfield, and the Husband-of-Awesome, we found MANY forum questions facing this same issue. One of the answers was that mypodcast.com had to delete old posts to make room, and that was causing the problems. Considering I had a whopping ONE podcast archived, I really wasn't ready to delete it… and even if I did, it probably wouldn't have solved the problem.

Long story short, I've moved the podcast to podbean.com - but our memory is now at 71% used with the whopping TWO episodes posted now.

le sigh!

Obviously, I'm off to see if a free hosting site exists that will let me have a few episodes… AND WORK! Am I really asking for so much?? Really?

Some general thoughts on podcasting, though, are that the advice I've found online all only match with the type of podcasts that the advice-givers had. While I have been able to glean bits and pieces from all the articles and publications I've read, I'm still floundering in the dark - especially on the hosting and promoting part.

The Broad Pod is basically a podcast of the trademark Rapid Fire Reading that Broad Universe has become known for at convention across North America. A Rapid Fire Reading throws together several women in one time slot, and we each give a small reading based on work we want to promote - or that fits the theme of the convention or convention track. It's an awful lot of fun, and the audience gets a variety of snippets from all sorts of work: humor, bone chilling horror, moving, hard science, social science, high fantasy, urban or contemporary fantasy…

It's great!

As a benefit to members who don't or can't attend conventions, the Broad Pod is opening up this promotional arena to them. Any member can send me a recording - regardless of if she attends conventions or not - and we will broadcast these readings to the world.

So, if you'd like to help members of Broad Universe AND hear some fabulous writing, feel free to check out our latest installment of the Broad Pod, as it is currently hosted here:

http://broadpod.podbean.com

And if you have any advice on my ever-so-wonderful hosting issues - please send me an email!

Enjoy!