Add Podcast

[Sancus]

We want a podcast to be available either from blog.thunderbird.net or another domain that may or may not host Wordpress.

We need to figure out what we want this to look like and what the best hosting plan would be.

Would be nice to get this available sometime in early September-ish.

[Alecaddd]

I'd recommend this solution as I used to run it for my personal podcast and it worked pretty nicely:

• Use Seriously Simple Podcasting plugin for WordPress https://wordpress.org/plugins/seriously-simple-podcasting/
• Have the Podcast Episodes be released as blog posts (the plugin does it)
• Create a dedicated /podcast-feed (the plugin offers this option) which is the pure RSS feed anyone can register to with their preferred podcast app.
• The plugin allows to publish the feed in the most common locations and making it discoverable almost anywhere.
• Manually publish it to Spotify (probably other specific services if they don't support auto publication through RSS).

Pros about using a plugin:

• Built-in reliable solution directly into WordPress
• Listening stats per-platform
• Handle podcasts episodes and notes like regular blog posts
• Handy metadata form to help non technical people do things properly when adding a new episode

Cons about using a plugin:

• Upload file size is limited based on the PHP file size limit of the server
• Very annoying to extract the podcast on its own platform after the fact, as the feed update and propagation changes are a bit of a pain and apps sometimes "think" that's a different podcast.

[Sancus]

TBH it seems to me it might be best to use a dedicated podcasting platform like transistor.fm, Captivate, or simplecast(Mozilla uses this for their "IRL podcast").

These seem to have useful features like automatic uploading to Spotify, Apple, etc, the ability to add transcriptions easily and other things. The cost is not significant either way.

I don't have a strong opinion on what we use, except of course that we're not self-hosting anything.

[LinuxForEveryone]

After discussing this in detail with @Sancus, here is what we need:

• Professional package from Transistor.fm
• Potentially free transcription service from Descript
• Creation of subdomain "podcast.thunderbird.net" (no web design needed)
• Setup Transistor.fm to use above subdomain. Details here.

This completely removes any potential downsides to self-hosting the content, and ensures that we have the "keys" to manage the content. It also provides ease of use for show producers with one-click submissions to the majority of podcast services/clients, analytics, embedded web players, and more.

It also negates any need for additional Wordpress plugins (which can sometimes present security vulnerabilities).