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How I fell into Podcasting and WordPress

Jason Tucker

Jason Tucker

— 4 min read

How I got into WordPress

I love WordPress, I’ve been using it since May 13th 2004 when I wrote this very twitteresque blog post to my moveable type blog:

The time has finally come where Moveable type is going to the sh*tter, it will still work, but they won’t be adding any more features to the free version. I’m going to be switching over to the WordPress platform over the next week. I may even try installing it over my lunch today.

From that time forward all of my websites were built-in WordPress and I love it dearly. WordPress makes my web developer faster, cleaner, more focused and enabled me to spin up a basic site in no time flat. Frameworks such as my framework of choice Genesis let me take something that already has a great foundation and build on it.

How I got into Podcasting

I’ve been doing podcasting since 2005. At the time I had a Dell Axim and an SD card for it and started recording small audio clips on there to be used as a podcast of sorts. I’ve always been a tinkerer and learning something new that I could bolt onto my existing skills such as adding a podcast to a WordPress site peaked my interest. I started my own “Jason Tucker” podcast a few months after I started working with WordPress when I found out how enclosure tags worked in an RSS feed and how FeedBurner was going to change everything. A year later I started attending the OC Podcasters group wanting to learn more and in 2007 I became president of that group. The last meetup for that group was April 8th, 2009. During that time we met at a restaurant/bar, then a church, a food bank, and even a dance studio which is where our last few podcast meetups were at (and quite echoy). During this time I ran a podcast that my wife and I did together where we complained about our kids, and a show called GeekFit which was a podcast about people who had a sedentary lifestyle yet wanted to lose weight. Both of these shows made it to the elusive 50 episode mark. This would make you think that we didn’t even do them for a year, but typically we recorded the shows on a very inconsistent basis and to their detriment.

My start in recording meetups

During these days of podcasting we didn’t record the meetups which saddened me. I got into audio and video podcasting and recording our events and posting them for the world to see. Back then we were sitting around talking and we had the pioneers of Podcasting here in the room with us and we learned a lot but all of it was stuck in that room. We got into doing “show notes” during the meetings and later I thought we should start recording or streaming the meetups. We used Flickr to post picture of the meetups and we used Ustream to host our live video streams of the meetings. The quality of my streams was bad, the process of getting the videos off of Ustream was hard and we ended up with what ever we got we got. I’m surprised at what we were able to do back in 2007!

We had some great speakers Dan Klass spoke a few times, Author Matthew Wayne Selznick spoke there and so did Steve Boyett of Podrunnerwith his didgeridoo (go to 1 hour 35 mins to see him tear it up on that thing). Douglas E Welch of Careers in Podcast  also spoke back in 2007 and was talking about Twitter being like crack 🙂

Before I continue I thought I’d name drop a few of these pioneers in podcasting from the OC area:  Michael W. Geoghegan, Craig Patchett, Steve Webb, Ron Ploof, Victor Cajaio, Russell Turley, Bob Wright, Scott Stys, Jeremy Vaught, Marcus Couch, Steve Holden, Adam Christianson, Douglas E Welch, Bill Palmer, and Paul McElligott.

Podcamps

Back in 2007 my friend Scott Stys and I did a Podcamp SoCal which was a unconference that we did during New Media Expo 2007. Chris Brogan was our Keynote speaker and we had lots of great speakers during this event. It was our first time doing an event like this, Chris Brogan was very supportive in our efforts and I think we ended up have a good event.

Media from the event:

Quite a few blogs spoke good and bad about our Podcamp SoCal:

Recordings from the event:

At these podcamps we’d stream live from the booth setup schedules for people to talk at the booth and overall be the “voice of the show”.  The 2007 PodCamp SoCal was butted up against the New Media Expo in Ontario CA which later became the Podcast and New Media Expo and after a few name changes it went from BlogWorld and then most recently NMX.

What do I want to do now

I’m seeing more and more podcasts come and go in the WordPress space. I think WordPress needs more podcasts where more information is readily available. This is why I started WPwatercooler because I knew I had the drive and experience to do it, I had the friends that would help support me in making the show happen and I know that doing live streaming from each of our homes and offices would be no big deal. I also knew that my friends would make me accountable for the show and getting it up each week. I love that podcast and love that I can do both an audio podcast and a YouTube channel with ease. Just recently we his a milestone of 1 million views on the YouTube channel.

What is in the future?

Taking the WPwatercooler show on the road is something I really want to do. Recently we did some live episodes from the show floor at WordCamp Phoenix 2013 and we will be doing more from upcoming WordCamps all over the place.

In an upcoming blog post I’ll talk about the podcasts I listen to, for now check out my personal blog for a list a did recently.

Do you want to get into podcasting? Need some help? Leave a comment below and I’d love to help you get your started!

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