We recorded the first episode of The Plazes Podcast last week, focusing on an upgrade to Plazes.com that went live on Friday. This was my first podcast edited completely with GarageBand, which worked surprisingly well. It’s also my first attempt at hosting podcast files on Amazon S3, which is also working surprisingly well.

The whole experience reminds me, though, of wise words I read recently from a prolific podcaster; he suggested that if you open the door to doing anything other than simply wrapping up raw audio in an MP3 — in other words if you decide to do any editing at all, from “um” deletion to trimming down for clarity — you’ve got to be prepared to put in some time.

It only took us 30 minutes to record the podcast (I recorded Skype using Audio Hijack Pro); to edit it down to the 18 minutes it ended up at, with intro, extro and my voiceovers edited in, to convert to MP3 and AAC, and to set up a podcast feed and hosting, took about 6 hours all told.

Oh, and apparently in Germany you say “places” when you read “plazes”. Here in Charlottetown we say “plazes” to rhyme with “blazes.”