This blog pot serves no purpose other than to highlight the ridiculousness of the current process for posting sermons for the Austin Stone Community Church. We built this system because the old system of hand hacking the html through Dreamweaver or a shell was too accident prone.
- Rip CDs from the service(s) that we’re putting online to WAV
- Use some audio editor to splice together the multiple tracks (split conveniently whenever Matt pauses for effect). Use same editor to pick and choose different parts from different sermons if something went partially wrong at the service we want.
- Upload WMA to specific folder on austinstone.org (the hosted server)
- Kick off web application residing on Doug’s private server, this automatically downloads the WMA from austinstone.org, then converts it to a compact mp3 with correct id3 tags, and uploads it to the right folder on austinstone.org
- Remote Desktop into the database server at the office and using Enterprise Manager add rows to the database for the sermon and the bible verses associated with the sermon, this becomes easier as you start to get the various foreign key ids memorized
- Navigate to media.austinstone.org to check if everything went correctly.
It’s a pretty straightforward process that only involves 4 separate hosts and only takes 20-30 minutes or so if you know what you’re doing and nobody interrupts you. This also constitutes the most thorough documentation of this process available anywhere, so if Doug and I get incapacitated during some late night Taco Cabana run, the sermon might be a little late getting posted the next week.