I thought it was probably about time to talk about the podcast, The1st10Minutes. We started recording late last year and it sort of just fell to me to be the guy that does most of the back end stuff. That includes, recording, editing, website.

Website

This is probably the easiest now. I bought the domain, easy $20 a year via godaddy, they already have all of my other domains. Web hosting, also easy, I already use hostgator, it’s under $10 a month for unlimited bandwidth and I don’t need much more. It only has to serve simple webpages (wordpress), rss feeds and files (mp3s).

I’ve used wordpress for a while now. If there’s a simple dynamic website task you want to do there is probably already a plugin out there that can do it for you. eg. Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin, we give it some info and it generates the iTunes compatible rss feed so we can be in iTunes, SNAP to auto crosspost to FB and Twitter and Disqus to handle comments. Finding a theme took longer than I would have liked and I ended up just purchasing 1 for about $40 bucks. It’s clean and is intended for podcasts so it doesn’t look like a bog roll. Unfortunately, it keeps breaking. Well plug-ins that it supports have changed and it’s struggling to update in a reasonable timeframe. So much so that I’ve disabled it right now until it calms down.

Uploading is annoying, the upload speed from my apartment in the city is pretty terrible, ~20kBps. So the podcast which is normally 2.5hrs long as a mono 96kb mp3 is around 100meg. So I have to ftp the file to wordpress, both because my hosting as a php upload limit and at that speed it takes over an hour normally to upload.

The initial setup time for website, social accounts and figuring out the process for getting into iTunes and testing the system was probably a day (<8hrs). On an average week maintenance of the website and populating it with content probably accounts for around an hour.

Recording

Apart from Ep 001 which was recorded in a quiet but small room, we’ve been recording in the theatrette here at work. It’s a larger space with adequate dampening. Background noise is low and consistent (very important) and while there are some echoes they are not unpleasing. Echoes I can’t do anything about, but background noise I can get in editing, especially when it is quieter than the speakers and is consistent throughout.

We record after hours, the podcast is normally between 2-3hrs but it takes us from 6pm to about 11pm to record. Some of this is dead time but we need breaks, talking nonstop is tiresome, thirsty work. We don’t have the most ergonomic set up. We all huddle around 1 microphone (a blue yeti) right now. So we need breaks frequently.

I record all of this via the usb mic into a Mac Book Air, recording directly into Adobe Audition. We stop and restart recording at each break so it is easy to trim later and doesn’t require hunting for problems or for me to be adding in marks/queues as it records. This results in about 2gig of wav data.

 

Up next time, editing and processes.