Freelance Unbound

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Legendary (or mouthy, depending on your stance) film critic Mark (”The Exorcist is the best film ever made”) Kermode had another life in the late 1980s in which he made this demo of anti-war folk song The Recruiting Sergeant. I was on bass, which is why I can post this with impunity.
Of course, the real reason to post this is because I am trying to figure out how to post audio into WordPress.com. As this isn’t yet self-hosted, it’s quite tricky to make the coding work. However – as this seems to have been successful, here’s the beginner’s guide (there’s lots of white space around the audio player, so you’ll need to scroll down about half a mile to see it). [UPDATE: finally figured out how to solve this].

1. Register with VodPod. This is a site that allows you to collect and share your favourite videos from around the web. It also lets you publish them to WordPress.com blog posts. Videos? Yes – but aha! It also treats audio files the same way, so you can post your podcasts and MP3s too. 
   
2. Record your audio. This was done in a dank basement studio in High Barnet in about 1988 for some reason, as I recall. So technically I did this as step 1. I was going to post our version of And The Band Played Walzing Matilda, which is actually quite good, but then I realised it was still in copyright. This is traditional I think, so it should be OK. 
3. Upload it to your third-party host. I chose Podbean – for no other reason than it was the first one in the Google search results that seemed to work, was free and had a reasonably friendly interface.
4. Copy the embed code. Podbean has this easily to hand at the bottom of the audio post. Well done Podbean.
5. Add your video to VodPod. Once you log into VodPod, there’s a link to do this on the top menu bar. Click through and go to the “paste embed code” tab. Paste the code and click on “Preview”. Then click on the “Save to  VodPod” tab.
6. Publish to WordPress. Once the audio/video is in VodPod, click through to it. Underneath the content is a “Share” button. One of the options is WordPress. Choose that and it asks you for the WordPress blog URL and your WordPress password. Live dangerously and reveal it. Then give your post a name and send to the editor. 
7. Edit in WordPress. Switch to your WordPress dashboard and you can edit the post for publishing.

It’s a bit round the houses, but incredibly it seems to work OK. Of course, if you are using the proper WordPress software on your own host, all this is redundant. I’ll be making that leap quite soon I think.

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