The "moblog solution"

With no offense intended to the mentally ill... this is insane, but it really does work. I think. I had a couple test blogs up and running, and am now trying to work out the bugs and typos with getting it to connect straight into the Ericast feed (at www.ericast.com, for those who don't know...)

So, what am I talking about?!? How could you have "bugs and typos"? Well, as you'll notice from the couple of posts floating around in this blog (which I've left for posterity's sake), when you post via audioblogger.com it just puts a post in your blog with a button. That's it. Nothing else. So, here are my rough notes on "Cleaning up Audioblogger posts to make the Podcast-ready":

Preliminary work to establish podcast:

  • Establish a blogger.com home for your podcast (podcast blog)
  • Burn the feed with feedburner.com
  • Publicize that feedburner feed as your podcast blog
Establishing audioblogger updates:

In your Blogger podcast blog, set a secret “incoming posts” e-mail address (e.g. emlarson.greengiraffe@blogger.com)

Create a new “receiver blog” in Blogger to hold your incoming voicemail
Name that blog appropriately (e.g. “Ericast Update”); this name will become the title of your podcast post
Don’t provide a site feed, comments, don’t put it in the directory, etc.
Set that blog to e-mail out when posted to
Make that e-mail something obscure on your own domain (e.g. bluekangaroo@emlarson.com)

Set up audioblogger.com to post to that “receiver blog” when called.
Make sure your username is something appropriate, since it will appear publicly in the podcast post

Set up an e-mail forward on your domain to forward the incoming receiver blog e-mail to your podcast blog (e.g. forward bluekangaroo@emlarson.com to ericasts.greengiraffe@blogger.com)

That’s it! When you call audioblogger, it posts to your receiver blog. That blog e-mails out the post with audio attachment, adding your blog title and the posting date as part of the e-mail message. That e-mail bounces through your domain – Blogger apparently prevents blogs from mailing to other blogger.com blogs – and gets posted to your podcast blog with a title of [receiver blog name] date time. Feedburner sees that post and turns it into an enclosure with the same name. That enclosure is what appears in your podcast feed.

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