About The Sermons
These sermons are recorded with a digital recorder, which records in WAV format. Formerly, they were recorded with a pocket voice recorder that encoded into the WMA format. Where there are missing sermons, it's probably because the pastor forgot the recorder at home, or the batteries went dead at just the wrong time.
The WAV files are then encoded into both the ubiquitous MP3 format and the better quality Ogg Speex format. The Speex encoding was designed for the human voice, and both compression and quality are excellent. This is all done with Free software.
The encoded files are then uploaded from my computer into a specialized folder structure on the web server. It consists of a single folder containing a collection of sub-folders with very specific names. Each sub-folder contains the sermon files for a single recorded service. The name of the sub-folder is the date on which the recording was made. The date is in the format YYYYMMDD, zero-padded if necessary (like 20070901).
A small PHP web page displays a listing of all the files currently available in the folder structure. You can see that listing here.
A somewhat larger, free PHP script was obtained that could generate a Podcast feed. When the web server receives a request at its address, this script generates a specially-formatted listing of the audio files currently available. The listing can then be used by a program similar to a web browser, that periodically updates an internal listing of all the audio files currently available, and automatically notifies the computer user when new audio files are available. It can also automatically download the new audio files, so that they are ready to play or transfer to a portable media player whenever the computer user would like. The link and data provided by the PHP script is called a "Podcast," named for the famous iPod device.
I modified the PHP podcast script to accomodate the folder structure we are using to store our audio files on the web server. With everything configured, the only thing needed to podcast and publish a new sermon is to upload the MP3 and Ogg Speex files into an appropriately named folder.
(It's slightly more complicated than that, since the web server doesn't know how to serve the Speex files, but you can ask me about the workaround if you need it.)
You can see the podcast feed data by clicking on either of the Podcast links in the left column of this web site. You can also download a copy of the PHP script that generates the podcast. Open the PHP file in a text editor, and you will see a little bit of documentation and some settings toward the top of the file. Adjust as necessary, and upload it to the folder just above the folder structure on your web server. Your mileage may vary.
