A while back we heard that posterous was shutting down. This was quite bad news for EDUtalk, we had a lot invested (time and files not money) in our posterous site.

I had a look at alternatives, Posterous to What? and decided on  a way forward EDUtalk, post posterous part 1. Since then we have been beavering away moving nearly 1000 bits of audio and the posts over from posterous to a new wordpress site.

One of the problems was the amount of space we need, there is already over 2GB of audio files hosted. Luckly Tim Owens @timmmmyboy of Hippie Hosting made us an offer we could not refuse!

The new site is by no means finished, but though that it was time to flick the switch and iron out any problems. We built the new site at edutalk.info, Just Now Last night I changed the nameservers for edutalk.cc to point to the same place. As I am typing this, the new site is, at least in my house, being reached via edutalk.cc, I am excited.

Changes

One of the great things about posterous was the wonderful way it handled media and its API. The api made it simple to pull in audio from Audioboo and iPadio, the FeedWordPress plugin makes this even easier. There is even a couple of benefits:

1. We can have the titles and links to the posts point back to the originating site.
2. FeedWordpress adds the enclosures to the feed, we were relying on Feedburner to create enclosures for Audioboo and iPadio posts and it was failing to do so. The new RSS feed has enclosures for all the content, a great improvement for listening in a podcatcher.

The other thing Posterous did for us was to give us an email address that anyone could send audio to and it would be pushed into the moderation queue to be published. This was the feature that got us started at SLFtalk. Posterous was really brilliant at handling spam, we never really saw much and, as far as I know, it never trapped any audio intended for the site.

There is a way to post to wordpress via email, but there is no spam filters so I don’t think that would work. What I’ve done instead, as a temporary measure is set up an email address audio@edutalk.info where folk can send audio, I’ll check it, convert audio to mp3(Again posterous was great at handling media), and post to the site. This will obviously be a wee bit slower that the old method.

Bonus Feature

As we are using FeedWordpress, we could incorporate other RSS feeds onto the site, this would allow folk to add audio from their own RSS feeds rather than just Audioboo and iPadio. I’d be delighted to hear from any one interested.

Technical Details

As I’ve poked around in the wordpress files to get the site going, I’ve done a wee bit of editing, I am going to blog about those soon, mostly for my own benefit.

An Open Invitation

As always, EDUtalk is open to contributions for anyone with anything to say about education. We are always delighted to get new contributions. We are also more than happy to help if you would like to get some audio onto the site. Please get in touch.

There is, of course, also an invitation to listen. There is some great podcasts on EDUtalk, the RSS feed is better making listening on mobile devices even easier.