Podcast.local – localhost podcasting

Last week I discovered a set of mp3′s covering Lean practices and principles.  You can access them here.  I’ve been on a bit of a management optimization stint lately and Lean is a very natural extension of Agile software development in to a broader management context.  It largely predates modern software techniques and represents one of the early generalizations of the Toyota Production System.

In any case that is not what I’m here to talk to you about.  In looking through these mp3′s the list of webinars was not collected in to any sort of podcast format.  This is frustrating because this would be ideal commute time listening on my iPhone.  Out of this frustration came podcast.local.  Podcast.local is a simple Rails application (really simple) that allows you quickly create a podcast through a series of forms.  The name comes from the naming convention provided by the Passenger preference pane on OS X.  If you set it up through the pref pane you will just need to go to http://podcast.local.  From there you can create your podcast one episode at a time and then subscribe to them through your iTunes.  The coole thing is that because it’s on the web iTunes just picks it and starts downloading episodes.

Like I said above, this application is too simple to go in to much detail.  I used it to do some experimentation with a few technologies that I haven’t had much time to mess around with.  Namely Blueprint CSS, jQuery, jQuery UI, and Paperclip.  Enjoy!