Project Kirby: Building podcasting tools

I find podcasting a beneficial format for digesting content from weekend binge-listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History to Distributed by Matt Mullenweg and all topics in between. There’s much to be gained, not just for entertainment purposes. Legal podcasters have a strong voice, and I want to make sure LexBlog is doing everything we can to help them.

This week I opened a ticket for our product team to develop tools for displaying podcasts in various formats on our portal pages. There are four components to work on: single post pages, features on a home page, archive pages, and index pages.

1. Single Post Pages: Podcast feeds that contain “MP3” in the URL should display basic playback controls, episode titles, and podcast art within a post.

2. Featured podcast(s) for portal home pages: This needs to show a specific podcast on the home page through our Featured Post Widget. Should display podcast artwork, Podcast titles, episode titles, description text, and playback controls

3. Podcast Archive Pages: Should display necessary podcast information along with a way to highlight the most recent podcast, then show all podcast episodes below in reverse chronological order.

4. Podcast Index Page: This should display a list of various podcasts on a single page. I see this working well on association pages or genre-specific portals (Legal Tech Daily).

At LexBlog, we are always looking to better our products and solutions for online publishers. We should be doing the same for the podcaster to ensure they have their content found and shared in the same manner and love that we have shown to bloggers.