Secrets of RSS
| You've probably seen a POD button but what are podcasts and how are they tied to RSS? As you may recall from Chapter 1, "Gotta Get My RSS," podcasts revolve mainly around the <enclosure> element that was added to RSS in version 0.92. Your RSS file's <enclosure> element is a URL pointing to a binary-file resourcesuch as sound, image, or videoon the Internet. You can record audio or video files as podcasts, and download them when you subscribe to a feed. You see more and more podcasts on the Internet these days, and all you have to do is subscribe to the feed when you see a podcast button (Figure 7.1). Figure 7.1. Podcasts from CNN.
After you've subscribed to a podcast, what happens next is up to your software. If you have an RSS reader that can handle podcasts, you'll see a link to an enclosure in each RSS item that contains a podcast; clicking that link lets you hear the podcast. If you have dedicated podcast software, the RSS item won't appear at allyou'll just hear the podcast after it's been downloaded. This chapter examines the whole process of adding multimedia to your feeds, starting with an overview of podcasting, then explaining how to create podcasts, put them into your feeds, and download them. |