Integrating your podcast

Video Transcript

Hi, everyone. Welcome. In this lesson, I’m going to show you how to showcase and display your podcast in your episodes on your site. So of course, let me share my screen. And if you recall this is a site, we’ve been working with in this module.

So this is our homepage and here on the home page, it’s exactly, where we’re going to add a new section right below the first and the second blocks of this page. We’re going to add a new section to showcase and to show our episodes. Before we do that, I just wanted to tell you that I did create a couple extra episodes for this lesson, just so we have a better view of how the blocks work, when we have multiple episodes, which we will at some point.

So if we had here into site’s pages and we click Home, we’re going to go to our home page editor. And here we’re going to create a block between the first and the second one. So I’m just going to reuse this second block. I’m going to click here on the More Options button, Duplicate. And this will create, well, a block exactly like the one we had before.

So I’m just going to change the text here. I’m going to center it. Delete the subscription log because we don’t need it and just so it doesn’t look like really weird with a kind of white line and break here in the middle. I’m going to change the background color to what? OK. We’re ready now to add our podcast episodes here and there are two blocks you can actually use to showcase your episode’s on a page or a post even.

If you click the plus to add a new block and you type podcast, you’ll notice there’s a block called podcast player. So this is the simpler, easier way of adding podcast episodes to a page or a post. And the only thing you need to add here is the RSS feed URL.

Now if you remember our first lesson, when we set up our podcast, as soon as we chose the category of our podcasts, we were given a URL there. And I told you, you could even you could either save it or go back and fetch it, whenever you need it. So that’s exactly what we’re going to do just to kind of refresh, where we can find this.

So I have another dashboard open here and on the left, if we had to manage settings and click the writing tab, there is a section here called podcasting. And here is our RSS feed. We just need to click the Copy button and go back to our page editor and passed our URL.

Once you click in there, it goes in and fetches all the information it can. So it will gather the episodes, it will gather the cover art image that it’s now coming up, the podcast title kind of the small excerpt for each episode. So we’ll it’ll get all the information it can from the RSS feed and display it in a very neat way with the players.

So your audience can just listen to the episodes right here and well from your homepage or wherever you decide to add this block. Now let me just check kind of take a small tour of the settings we have and what we can do with this block.

So here on the right we have many settings. We can choose how many items we choose, or we display and if we kind of decrease this, I just wanted to show you that for instance, we have three items at the moment and we decided to showcase only two. So it will only show the latest two. It one show the first and this is how it will always organize your episodes same as your posts.

So it will always showcase from the latest to the oldest. Now let’s go back. Let’s say we want five. So every time we launch a new episode it comes up. And here we have settings, where we can define whether we want to show or hide the image, episode titles, episode descriptions. It was right here below the player and we can choose a couple of colors.

So let me just show you what each does. So the primary color changes this and kind of the episode titles, well, this sort of text. So the episode that is in showcase at the moment, we go back to black and the secondary color kind of changes the font color of what was not changed on the primary one. So we go back to black and the background color – well, let’s you change the background of the block.

So we’re going to put it right again and this is it. So this is the Podcast Player Block. Now the other block I wanted to show you is when you click plus here to add a block, you can choose a block called blog posts. So this block is a bit more complex and it’s used – well, in general it’s a block that gathers all the posts you have on your site including your podcast episodes.

So first of all, let me change the settings because it’s taking a lot of space on our homepage and let’s put it into agreed format. So there are many formats here and many things you can change here. Feel free to play around. This is a highly customizable block.

So if you notice here on the right, well, you can choose whether to add borders to the grid or not, there are many settings here. And if you notice, we have three as the number of items, which is very fortunate because we only have three episodes but what if we wanted set it for instance six.

So you notice that when we increase our blog posts, there are not podcast episodes start coming up. And this is not what we want. We only want to show podcast episodes. So fortunately we can filter the posts slash episodes that appear on this block. And we can do in these filters here on the right.

So because we have a category and we chose to name it podcast, we can just come here choose podcasts and only the podcast episodes will appear on this block. Now there are many other settings. You can customize a number of columns. So you can only put 2, 3, you can even increase it if you want.

You can show a more button just so for instance, if you have 20 episodes and you only want to show 3 upfront but you can add a more button so people can load more episodes if they want to. And then you have, well, kind of how to control and controls to decide what information it appears and what information, well, is hidden.

So we can Show/Hide our featured image, same for the excerpt. We can change the font size, the font color. We can kind of change or hide the dates, the category, because it’s always podcast category in our case. So we can just hide it. If you’re the only person and the only author on this podcast, maybe you don’t need to show the author all over again.

So you can just hide it but it’s totally up to you. This block has many, many, many customization options for you. So well, just feel free to play around with this. So these are the two blocks I wanted to go over. There’s only one extra thing, I wanted to show you.

So if we come here to on the plus sign, I mean, we need to leave the cover block for this. So here on the plus sign, we can choose to add blocks as we’ve been doing. So here you’ll find all the blocks you can add. And there’s one thing here on the right called patterns.

So patterns are basically a set of blocks that we’ve put together. And well, kind of save you some time, so you don’t have to build these patterns all over again. So you’ll notice you’ll have many different arrangements of text and image, and well, many, many things.

And if you type here because you can search the same way you can search for blocks, you can search for patterns. And you’ll notice we have two podcasts patterns. And we can choose either, if we want to. And it will add a full block with – well, everything is customizable. So you can change the text here. You can change the text here. And here you can add links to all the podcast directories you chose to submit your podcast feed too.

So if we submit it to Apple, we can click here. Click here on the link button and at our feed URL here on Apple, not, I mean, not feed URL, we can add our Apple Podcasts link here. Same goes for Spotify, Google, et cetera. So as you start submitting your podcasts to different directories, you will receive the links of your podcasts on each of those. So you can add your links here and you can even delete.

So let’s say you don’t want to add your RSS feed here, which we highly advise but you can decide not to. You can just click here on the More Options and remove block. And it will remove. And if you want to add a new one, you can just click to add a button. Now let’s put this up.

So we can just move this block up. Let’s say we wanted it here right below our new blocks, we can add it here and we click Update. And our homepage is ready. So of course, on your page, you would probably choose between this block and this – in between the first Podcast Player Block and the Blog Post Block. Probably you wouldn’t chose to put them both on your homepage.

But for the purpose of this lesson, I’m going to leave both of them just so we can see how they look. So this is our home page. We have here our first block with the player. And then we have the second block, which is a Blog Post Block. And then we have our new shiny podcast’s patterns. OK.

So I think we’re done with our homepage. And let’s now do a couple more things. So there are two other things we can do to kind of showcase our podcast in our site. So one of the things is adding a podcasts link here to our menu. And that is done in their design customize and there are menus here.

One of your menus will be your primary view. Maybe you have more than one, but one of them will be set as your primary menu. So click that and we click add items. And as before we do have a category for this and it’s our podcast category. So we can just click this.

And you’ll notice, we can go back here, just click on the left, will hide the right pane. And you’ll notice that we already have a podcast link on our menu. And let’s say we want to move it up, we can just click reorder, move up and the order changed. And we’re done. I wanted to show you how our podcast category page or the menu we added in our site that’s called podcast, how it looks from the frontend.

So when a visitor or one of your listeners visits your website, what does it look like if they click the podcast link we added to the menu. So this is our site. And if weekly podcast here – so the link we added before, we will see a category page from the podcast category, which is what we added and I wanted to show you. So it just shows a list of all the episodes we have so far.

So scrolling up and down, you’ll notice that only the podcast episodes appear on this page. So although we have other blog posts, because they don’t have the podcast category, they are not shown on this page. So of course, this page will look very different depending on the theme you’re using.

So each theme defines a different way of showing category pages. So in this case, in fact the featured image is kind of appearing a bit larger than probably we would like but other themes we’ll show this in a different way. So do experiments on your site.

See if you like how it appears and well, that is it. One thing I also wanted to explain is that if you check the only thing that you can see here is the title, the cover, while the featured image of each episode and the excerpt we defined.

So in order to see the full posts, your visitors or listeners would have to click either the title or the image. And clicking a title just to show you, it takes you to the podcast episode page. So it has the image. It has audio file. We added the description, the transcripts, et cetera. OK. So we’re all done here.

I just wanted to add an extra note here. So under manage settings as, you know, already we have and the writing, we have a podcasting area here, where we can get our RSS feed but if you look a bit up so the previous area is called feed settings.

So this area here defines how many blog posts appear on a blog page. But also it also defines how many podcast episodes appear on your feed. So at the moment, it’s set to 20. Imagine if you have 30 or 40 or 50 episodes, you might want to increase here.

This is also important because you might notice at some point that only the latest three episodes are being submitted and you might wonder, why? There is a high chance that here in the feed settings, you have a lower number. And if you do, only a lower number of episodes will appear on your feed.

So this is just a note. In case this happens, you know how to change it or at least how to start troubleshooting it. So once you change this, you just need to click the Save settings and you’re all set. OK. So this is it for this lesson. Thank you.

Resources

Learning Action

Add a Podcast Player block to your site’s homepage, or another page on the site.
Add a Blog Posts block to your site’s homepage.
Add your site’s podcast category to the navigation menu.
Adjust the number of episodes/posts in your feed under Settings->Writing. You’ll want to make sure you’re in the Default View for this page to see the settings.

Intro to Podcasting

Intro to Podcasting

Integrating your podcast

Video Transcript

Resources

Learning Action

WordPress.com

Mobile Apps

Social Media