There are those who are computer savvy and those who are not. I’m fairly savvy, but until six months ago, I only had a vague notion of what a ‘podcast’ was, and five months ago I did not really know what RSS was or meant. Now I’ve come to realize that the sermons that are preached here at HPC are available through both means, and I appreciate that.
Each week, the sermons at HPC are recorded and turned into .mp3 files of about 10 to 12 MB each. (Geoff’s files are smaller for some reason. Go figure.) These sermons are then posted on the church’s web site here. Anytime for the next three months that sermon can be listened to or downloaded by any interested person. There are two ways for you to receive immediate notification that a sermon has been posted and is ready for download.
For those of you using iTunes you can subscribe to HPC sermons as a podcast. Open iTunes, select the advanced menu, and select the item ‘Subscribe to Podcast.” In the requester that opens, paste this link:
http://www.gohope.net/Resources.Sermon_Downloads?rss=1
Click ‘ok’ and you are done. iTunes will automatically download messages according to the parameters you set within iTunes. Then every week, when a new sermon is posted, iTunes will automatically add it to your computer. If that podcast is synced with your iPod, then every week a new sermon ‘magically’ will appear on your iPod ready to be listened to.
I suspect this process is possible as well with Windows Media Player and other .mp3 players, If so, you would use this same link.
If you do not use iTunes but still want the same ease of notification and download, this same link can be pasted into an RSS reader, if you use one. The one I use on the Mac (Shrook, which is free) automatically notifies me of each new sermon as it is posted. I am sure there are similar programs for Windows. Firefox has an extension called ‘Sage’ which is very nice for doing this sort of thing.
Alternatively, if you use Google as a home page, you can set it up to read and display any RSS feed. From your home page, select the ‘Add Stuff…’ button, and then select ‘Add by URL.’ This will bring up a requester in which you paste the link above and, voila, on your Google page will appear each new HPC sermon as it is posted.
By the way, these are good ways to keep up with “Somber and Dull.” The following link sets up this blog as an RSS feed as well:
https://randygreenwald.com/
Automating this could be a real help to you who have any difficulty with figuring things like this out. Set these feeds up once, and they come automatically as long as one might want.