Voices for Christ is now Podcasting our Message of the Month. You can subscribe to the Podcast feed and keep your portable MP3 player in sync with the Message of the Month automatically. You can read about Podcasting and learn how to subscribe on our Podcasting page. Let us know how you like it!

Here are some technical details of how this works. We use Wordpress for this “Say On…” news section and it was pretty simple to set up a podcast feed from inside Wordpress. Here are the steps:

1. Create a new podcast category in Wordpress
2. Added a Podcast quick tag to the Wordpress “Write Post” screen following these instructions. This is optional, but since a podcast feed uses RSS2 enclosures and that requires absolute URLs for the content, this addition simplifies life quite a bit.
3. Added some Rewrite rules to the main .htaccess file to redirect to the podcast feed URL from outside of the wordpress install area. Read about it here
4. We use a script to pull the main RSS feed and transform it into the news div on the front page. I modified this to ignore posts in the new podcast category. That is why I’m writing this article so that news about the podcast channel shows up on the front page.
5. Wrote a quick page of instructions and linked it into the front page in the Message of the Month area

Pretty simple, and cool too.