I did this talk at Blog Orlando 3 and thought some people might find this useful. Feel free to share and get in touch with me if you have any questions or comments.

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Podcasting Links
• Hivelogic Podcasting Equipment Guide: This is an excellent guide by Dan Benjamin
• Rails Envy Podcast (Shameless self promotion) .
• Podcasting Tools - Provides a ton of information setting up a podcast.

Microphone Links
• Kustom KM4 - Cheap but will get the job done (Don’t buy this).
• Samson C01U - Complete podcasting pack. This is USB so there is the latency effect involved with hearing yourself. Great for starting out.
• M-Audio Nova - This is the (arguably) the best mic you can get for under $200.
• Shure SM7B Dynamic Microphone - Fantastic mic with great audio. Top of the line. As Dan Benjamin says, it’s a great “pro-sumer” mic.

Equipment Links
• M-Audio MobilePre USB Mobile Preamp - If you decide to go with a mic with an XLR connection, you’ll need this.
• Digidesign MBox 2 Mini - Awesome usb preamp that comes with pro tools. More of a “pro-sumer” item. This will only work with one mic at a time, though, so you’ll need a mixer of some sort if you want more.

Enhancing Your Podcast
• Sound Snap for sound effects.
• PodSafe Music Network for Music you can (legally) play on your podcast.

Podcasting Services
• FeedBurner for podcasting easy podcast feed setup and stats.
• PodPress - Wordpress plugin for easy podcasting setup.

Today while I was preparing the post, I remembered that Backpack had an API. A quick google turned up the Backpack API page with a link to the Ruby wrapper. About 10 minutes and some regular expressions later I had a script to auto format the weekly podcast links each week by just passing in the page id.

require 'rubygems'
require 'XmlSimple'
require 'ruby_wrapper'
 
stories = []
backpack = Backpack.new('username', 'api key');
backpack.page_id='the page you want'
notes = backpack.list_notes
notes = notes['notes'].first['note']
 
# {'title' => 'A note', 'id' => 'An id', 'content' => 'asdf followed by a url'}
notes.each do |note|
  story_link = note['content'].scan(/(http\:\/\/.*)$/m)[0]
  stories.push("<li><a title=\"#{note['title']}\" href=\"#{story_link}\" rel=\"nofollow\">#{note['title']}</a></li>".gsub(/\n/,''))
end
 
puts stories.join("\n")

require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
 
doc = Hpricot(open("http://url/"))

However, this won’t give you the output you want. The open method on Open-URI leaves the output in the default character set of the page. If you want to convert it to utf-8, you need to use the iconv library:

require 'rubygems'
require 'iconv'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
 
f = open("http://url")
f.rewind
doc = Hpricot(Iconv.conv('utf-8', f.charset, f.readlines.join("\n")))

Unobtrusive Javascript Presentation from Jason Seifer on Vimeo.

It was a true tragedy I didn’t win this.