Walk in 3 Worlds Podcast
I entered into this project knowing almost nothing about podcasts. I had video recorded a session on Podcasting with WordPress by Tony Cosentino at Word Camp Brisbane 2018, but I had no real experience in creating content; publishing that content to the various platforms; and building the required WordPress website to support the podcast.
But that was all about to change.
I was approached by the ever-enthusiastic Greg Dodge, a colleague from my years in the music industry. Greg was working on yet another idea and this time it was to create a community around his life experiences involving people of various cultural backgrounds. He had begun to produce content for a podcast to be called “Walk in 3 Worlds”. This was reference to the fact that the three co-hosts came from three distinct cultural backgrounds (or worlds) and yet they have learned to walk together in all three worlds.
A podcast is an episodic series of spoken word digital audio files that a user can download to a personal device for easy listening. (Wikipedia) Podcasts are a great way to get your message to your audience in a convenient form which allows listeners to connect with you at their convenience …in the car, on the train, while walking, in fact anywhere. They are accessible from a large number of publicly accessible platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, etc, etc.
Greg was keen to start a podcast on inter-culturalism in Australia. He had determined the two co-hosts that he wanted to work with and was steadily building a team of creative professionals who would help him to craft the digital content and get it out there to his audience.
He initially contacted me through my LinkedIn page and we had some face to face meetings. The rest is history.
Walk in 3 Worlds Podcast is an exciting intercultural change making space with stories inclusive of Australian First Nations people (Indigenous), multicultural (new migrants) and the early migrants (colonists, and convict descendants).
Greg had begun to put together a WordPress website as the home of the podcast and had established an account with blubrry Podcasting as the hosting platform for his episodes. Blubrry has a free WordPress plugin called PowerPress which is available to download from the WordPress repository.
The idea is that you upload your episodes as mp3 files to the blubrry platform and the episodes then become available on every platform that you have connected to.
The Walk in 3 Worlds Podcast was also to be available in video form and a few episodes had already been uploaded to the ,YouTube channel which Greg had established.
The next step was to build a WordPress website which would be the home of the podcast and the community which Greg intends to build around the whole theme of inter-culturalism in this country.
The site needs to be the platform to promote the podcast; to host a blog on associated issues; to announce upcoming live events; and to build a community of like-minded individuals and organisations who might like to sponsor the whole endeavour.
An interesting aspect of this website was the final mastering of the digital content for delivery through podcast and video. This primarily involved conforming the audio levels to the accepted loudness standards for each of the delivery platforms.
Some technical aspects of the website
| Hosting | The site is hosted on a dedicated server on the Amazon AWS platform. It is a LiteSpeed server and so LiteSpeed cache and LiteSpeed image optimisation are available. |
| Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Bunny CDN is used as the content delivery network for the site and videos are delivered through Bunny streams using the Presto Player (pro version). |
| Theme and Page Builder | The site is built in the native WordPress builder (Gutenberg) using the Kadence theme and Kadence Blocks. |
| Forms | All forms on the site are created using Fluent Forms and email notifications are delivered through Fluent SMTP connected through Mailgun. |
| Contact Relationship Manager (CRM) | Fluent CRM is used to keep in contact with the community of enquirers, supporters and sponsors. This CRM is fully integrated with all Fluent Forms and is used to create and distribute newsletters from within the WordPress site. No need for an external service such as MailChimp. |
| Backups | Along with the regular backups provided as part of the hosting platform, the site is also backed up using UpDraft Plus to the Microsoft Azure platform. |
| Domain Registration and DNS | Management of the domain name and DNS services are provided through my associate site – through my reseller relationship with TPP Wholesale. |
