How Can You Add Audio to a Blog?

I had been looking for ways to add extra pizazz to my blogs and sites, and have only just got into audio and podcasts. Podcasts seem to rank well in SEO. I started by reading a couple of my articles to create a soundfile (using Audacity shareware) and LAME shareware as the format converter to.mp3. It was all easy to set up. The results were passable, and I quickly learned how to edit/splice the sound files using Audacity (after getting tired of umpteen re-takes).

Then I looked more closely at WordPress and discovered that I couldn't just load and go. I dug around and came across a number of articles referring to WordPress plugins such as Cool Player and Anarchy Media Player. I didn't feel like setting up yet another plug in, with the attendant danger of the software becoming unsupported and so on (lorelle's WordPress blog was very informative).

So, I got to thinking. I'd just posted a podcast on Podbean and wondered whether I could make use of that. And I did, though it only appears to work on Wordpress blogs which are not hosted by Wordpress themselves.

Here's how:

1. Log into your Podbean account and locate the required podcast under the My Dashboard/Manage tab.

2. Below the 'Play Now' buttons you should see the rectangular Audio MP3 button. Alongside this is a list of options underlined with dashes.

3. Click the 'Embeddable Player' option and copy (ctrl+c) the script code in the box. There is currently a choice of only two button colours. I had a look at the html code and couldn't see a quick way to change the button theme colours.

3. Now, create your post in your Wordpress blog, with some appropriate text - just a brief summary of what is in the Podcast. My preference is to include the full text of the article/post and offer the Audio option:

'In a hurry? No time to read this great post? Hit the Podbean button and listen in while you do something else!'

4. Then, paste in the Podbean script where you want it in your post(make sure that you have the html view of the post). I prefer to put it at the beginning, as you don't want people to read your post and then find out that they could have listened to it (though it does depend on content - whether it is pure entertainment or informational).

That's it - just publish/update your WordPress post and the button is live.

The great thing is that the button goes out on the blog's RSS feed and is accessible on the feedreader (I use feedburner, so I have not tested any others) - the button displayed properly, and worked as it should have.

This technique also works on blogger.

So, that's all there is to it, looks good, works good, but doesn't always fit the theme colours!