I’d Hike That: My First Podcast
I had never done a podcast before, honestly, I hadn’t even ever thought of doing a podcast. When presented with the opportunity to make a podcast, it took me a while to think of what I wanted to create a podcast about. I wanted to choose something that was important to me, entertaining, and not too difficult to create 3 podcast episodes about. I filtered through the idea of talking about puppies, babies (I had just had my first baby), cleaning the house, movie watching, but none of those seemed like they would offer me enough content for this assignment, as well as the rest of the assignments throughout the semester. In the end, I chose hiking, it is something that I have always wanted to get into, and my husband is a hiker so I thought it would be great to involve him in recording the podcast.

I started off my podcast creation by creating a plan of what I wanted to cover in each of my podcast episodes. I had originally planned on creating videos for each podcast but then realized that because I would only be speaking, I didn’t want to be sitting there in front of the camera.
After planning out the episodes, I went through a few rounds of peer reviews to get more ideas and critiques from other students. Some ideas I got from my peers were to add animal and nature sounds, and the biggest suggestion that I ended up going with was to switch the last episode for an after hike theme instead of doing a video of the actual hike.
Recording the podcasts was not as awkward and time-consuming as I had predicted it would be. I used a simple recording app on my phone and then sent the recordings to my google drive.
The next step was creating the cover art for the podcast, I used an image that my husband had taken on one of his hikes and then added the title of the podcast to it. I wanted to keep it simple because the most important thing was the actual recording of the episodes, not the cover art.

After I had recorded the episodes I really wasn’t sure what to do next, I knew I somehow had to upload the podcast to a server, so I read a handful of articles, asked around and then I pretty much just went for it. I uploaded my podcast recordings to Buzzsprout.com, I filled in the metadata and added the cover art.
I added my podcast to iTunes by following the steps on buzzsprout , then I was completely lost with what I should do next! I did some research and found out that the XML and RSS feed are very similar in many ways. I wasn’t able to find the XML URL so I ended up turning in the RSS feed and the itunes URL.
