New F∃tures

So yeah. Podcasting. The whole personal radio show thing… I think it’s a neat idea, in most cases. Sturgeon’s Law applies, of course, especially to anything I happen to produce.

Anyway, the reason I bring it up is that we’re looking at doing internal podcasts of some of the medical lectures here. Which means I get to experiment and geek out a bit, learning how things are done. Which means that you get to benefit from my mistakes, if you’re trying to do the same thing.

I’m not going to get into the basics. There’s so many ways to produce an audio file on your computer that it’d take too long to go into them all. The kind of tricky part is creating an online feed that can be understood by your subscriber’s playback software.

Again, I’m going with the basic premise that you’ve got a site where you can post stuff. And for the sake of completeness, I’m also assuming you’re an Earth native who has a computer and can breathe in our oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. If I’m wrong about that last part, you might want to give SETI a call.

Anyway, once you’ve got your recording done, all you need is a valid format XML file for people to subscribe to. Here’s a basic one, with all of the stuff you need to replace in ALL CAPS:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?>
<rss version="2.0">
	<channel>
		<title>PODCAST TITLE</title>
		<description>PODCAST DESCRIPTION</description>
		<link>URL OF HOST</link>
		<language>en-us</language>
		<copyright>COPYRIGHT INFO</copyright>
		<lastBuildDate>BUILD DATE</lastBuildDate>
		<pubDate>PUBLICATION DATE</pubDate>
		<webMaster>EMAIL ADDRESS</webMaster>


		<item>
			<title>ITEM TITLE</title>
			<description>ITEM DESCRIPTION</description>
			<link>ITEM URL</link>
			<enclosure url="ITEM URL" length="SIZE IN BYTES" type="audio/mpeg"/>
			<category>CATEGORY</category>
			<pubDate>PUBLICATION DATE</pubDate>
		</item>


 	</channel>
</rss>

You can update the file as you add more ‘shows’ to your podcast. Just duplicate everything between the <item> and </item> tags and update the tags to point to the new show file.

One other problem that crops up is that when your subscriber clicks on the subscription link, it opens up the XML file in their browser instead of adding your podcast to their subscriptions. Fortunately, thanks to this article, there’s a handy way to set up your subscription link so that people can connect to it correctly:

<a href="URL OF PODCAST XML FILE"
	onClick="prompt('To subscribe to this podcast,
		copy this link and and paste into your aggregator software
		(e.g., iTunes or iPodder).',
	'URL OF PODCAST XML FILE');
	return false;">
	<img src="SUBSCRIPTION BUTTON" border="0"/>
</a>