OFF: Re: Aural Innovations Radio

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 05/10/2006 10:06, Jerry Kranitz wrote:
> Carl asks...
>>Hey, I don't suppose there's an RSS-feed URL so that one could subscribe 
>>directly to these as an iTunes podcast?
> 
> I am really struggling to understand this RSS-feed stuff. Most podcast links
> I see are just an mp3 download like my own. If anyone could point me in the
> right direction for how to set this up I'd love to do it. 

Yeah, I've only started to look at it a bit myself since I've normally 
just downloaded straight MP3 podcasts like yours or the nugs.net 
nugscast.  But my wife was toying with the idea of Spanish-language 
guided meditation podcasts (!) and I spent some time messing around with 
iTunes and had to admit that having a "subscription" to a periodically 
updated podcast series, where each episode downloads itself 
automatically as it's made available, is pretty handy for the terminally 
confused and disorganized such as myself.  (This feature is 
theoretically useless without iTunes, but the fact is that a 
knowledgeable programmer should be able to pretty easily code up a 
standalone client utility that did the same job.)

So -- as I understand it, RSS is a "web feed" format (or family of 
related formats).  It is specified with XML, and webmaster's can use RSS 
to communicate content automatically to RSS-aware browsers.  Places like 
the BBC news site use RSS to automatically deliver headlines to people 
who subscribe to their news feed: 
<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/help/3223484.stm>

iTunes podcasts work basically the same way, as I understand it.  Along 
with your MP3 file, you create an appropriatly formated RSS file that 
points to your MP3 podcast file.  Then, whenever people enter the URL 
for the RSS file into iTunes (or, theoretically, some other RSS-aware 
audio browser), iTunes automatically checks to see how many episodes of 
the podcast are available and downloads the latest one.  I believe it 
carries on checking occasionally to see whether you've uploaded a new 
podcast episode.

Those are, _I think_, the basics.  I found a page on Apple's site 
<http://www.apple.com/itunes/store/podcaststechspecs.html> which 
discusses this in more detail, includes an example RSS file, and links 
to further information.  I've not actually _done_ this myself ;) and 
it's easily possible that I've missed some key point, but clearly loads 
of people _do_ do it successfully, so it ought to be possible to figure 
out with a bit of trial and error.  If you cook up an RSS file and want 
a live test case, feel free to send me the URL and I'll tell you whether 
it works or falls over in a heap :)

Cheers,
Carl

-- 
Carl Edlund Anderson
mailto:cea at carlaz.com
http://www.carlaz.com/