Integrate WordPress and Blog Talk Radio

We’ve had our radio show going for a couple months and continue to build a great following thanks to Blog Talk Radio. Most recently, friends Erik Deckers and Kyle Lacy were on to discuss their latest book Branding Yourself: How to Use Social Media to Invent or Reinvent Yourself.

We’ve been very satisfied with Blog Talk Radio. It’s a great service that’s simple to use and doesn’t require any special audio skills to get started. We’ve got a Yeti podcasting microphone, but the service also allows you to dial in. This week we had some issues with our Internet so we just used my speakerphone on my mobile phone to do the show.

I had already modified the sidebar to display the latest radio shows, but I really wanted to integrate an audio player so that visitors could play the episode directly from the sidebar. Within the fetch_feed loop that reads the feed and displaying it, you just have to add a code snippet to integrate the mp3 file from Blog Talk Radio.

This will add the actual path to the mp3 player directly within the square brackets that passes the variable to the insert_audio_player function:

[audio:<?php $item->get_permalink(); ?>.mp3|width=100%]

This makes points the audio player to the sound file that’s hosted at Blog Talk Radio. Not too bad with one line of code!