RSSFaq

From B.Comm media wiki

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What is RSS?

Really Simple Syndication. It is an automatically generated 'feed' of information (for example from a blog) that you can subscribe to. This means that instead of visiting that information source manually (eg by visiting a website) you can subscribe to the RSS feed and then the information comes to you.

You can use this to keep up with blogs, but lots of other web resources that have time based content now also use RSS (it was developed for blogging), such as the BBC.

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How Do I Make a RSS Feed?

Well, two answers. The first is that you don't have to do anything. WordPress automatically creates an RSS feed for you. This is one of the benefits of using a Content Managment System like WordPress. The second answer is that while WordPress automatically creates a feed it does not do a very good job of adding enclosures, which is what a feed with audio or video is called.

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How Do I Make a RSS Feed with Enclosures only using WordPress?

First of all make sure that if you are using WordPress 1.5 you edit the functions.php file as decscribed.

If you are using WordPress 2 or better then stay tuned...

  1. upload video and/or audio in usual way.
  2. embed in your blog post in usual way.
  3. in WordPress, below where you write your entry, there is a custom fields section. From the drop down menu choose "Enclosures"
  4. in the Value field paste in the full URL of your media file (the actual media file)
  5. this will add an enclosure to the post
  6. this will work in most cases, however the RSS should also include the file size and type, so if this causes problems you should take this feed and then use Feedburner to tidy it up properly.
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How Do I Make a RSS Feed with Enclosures using Feedburner?

  1. The embed tag that you use to enclose video needs to include a rel="enclosure" element. This is shorthand for relationship equals enclosure.
  2. This rel="enclosure" must point to the actual video, and not, for instance, a poster movie.
  3. Therefore if you have a poster movie you could simply include a link to the actual video (what the href part of the embed tag points to) by writing a link to the video itself. This could be invisible, just make sure it includes rel="enclosure"
  4. Create an account in feedburner.
  5. In this feedburner account enter the URL of your blog
  6. Feedburner will identify all the RSS feeds your blog has, select the RSS 2.0 feed
  7. Somewhere in Feedburner you can enable the 'smartcast' features, this is Feedburner language for RSS with enclosures
  8. Once you've done this there will be a RSS feed that Feedburner produces, if you subscribe to this RSS feed then you will receive RSS with enclosures from your blog (this is video or podcasting)
  9. Feedburner can automatically provide some code that you can copy and paste into the sidebar of your blog that indicates the RSS feedburner feed - other people use this to subscribe to your feed with enclosures.

Image:relEnclosure.jpg

Through your feedburner account you can change your feed, add more feeds, change settings and so on at any time. All of the above is also possible through mefeedia. NOTE: An alternative way of doing this, but this may not work in WordPress 1.5 is:

  1. embed video or audio in your blog in the usual way
  2. in addition include a link to the actual video or audio file in the body of your blog post, and don't worry about making it visible (so make a href link to the media file, close it with a closing tag, but don't place that tag around anything so there is nothing visible to click on)
  3. in this href tag include rel="enclosure" as a part of the href
  4. WordPress will automatically read the enclosure element and at it to its RSS feed

NOTE: this is confirmed in WordPress 2 but not in WordPress 1.5.

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Can I Have More Than One RSS Feed?

Yes. You already have this happening in your WordPress blog. It has RSS for posts, for comments, and you can also (depending on which template you're using) have RSS for each of your categories in your blog.

In addition you can create as many feeds as you need using third party services like feedburner. For example if you were using feedburner to generate feeds with enclosures you could have a feed for low rez videos, another for hi rez, and another for audio only!

Now, WordPress does all this automatically, but this is not a good idea (I might explain all this in more detail here later). So you are better off doing the following (yes it is a multistep process but this is good):

  1. visit http://www.feedburner.com and set up an account for yourself
  2. add your RSS feed to your feedburner account and set it up to add enclosures (you can read the help at feedburner which explains all this)
  3. the RSS feed that feedburner creates for you (which you can add to your blog sidebar for others) will have enclosures

You can also do this using mefeedia.

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How Do I make a PodCast or VideoCast for iPods?

This assumes that you have already recorded and edited whatever it is you want to publish for the iPod. From within your editor export to QuickTime. Make sure you have QuickTime pro since then:

  1. from the presets that are available simply choose Movie to iPod (320x 240) - this guarantees the correct codecs and data rates (you can use this whether you're compressing audio or video#from the presets that are available simply choose Movie to iPod (320x 240) - this guarantees the correct codecs and data rates (you can use this whether you're compressing audio or video
  2. upload and publish via your blog in the usual way.
  3. make sure you have included rel="enclosure" as described above.
  4. the crucial thing for the iPod is to make sure you meet the compression requirements because the iPod can only play back video compressed to a certain data rate (audio is easier)
  5. the absolute easiest way is to use QuickTime Pro and choose File Export

Alternatively if all you want is audio you can also choose the File Export and from the drop down menu select the Movie to MPEG Audio Layer-3 (MP#) option. Upload and embed as per instructions above.


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RSS Clients

RSS clients are programs that let you subscribe to lots of RSS feeds, and of course to manage these subscriptions. They are just like email clients (which is what we call email programs that manage your email). Just as with email clients there are web based clients, and standalone clients. A web based client means that you log in to a web site and there are all your RSS feeds. A standalone client means that it runs on your local computer and collects all your feeds there.

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StandAlone RSS Clients

BlogBridge
Is a free open source, cross platform RSS aggregator.
Netnews Wire
A commercial RSS client. Very powerful and very good.
Netnews Wire Lite
Scroll to the bottom of the page and you'll find Netnews Wire Lite, the free OS X RSS client.
iTunes
iTunes is the free application for Mac and PC from Apple. It supports subscribing to video and audio casts but unlike the other RSS clients doesn't support text.
Fireant
This is Mac and PC RSS client that supports video and audio enclosures (like iTunes). It has a lot of other nice things built in too, currently free and still going through a lot of development.
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Web based RSS Clients

Bloglines
One of the earliest web based RSS aggregators. You have an account and you can manage as many subscriptions as you like.
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How Do I Subscribe to a RSS Feed?

You need to have a RSS client to be able to use for your subscriptions. So, assuming you have a RSS client you need to find some RSS. Most news sites now provide RSS, for example the BBC RSS page has a pile of excellent information and specialised RSS feeds. You can tell if a site provides RSS usually by locating a RSS badge somewhere on the page (a small 'button' or 'image' that says RSS. If it says "podcast" or "ATOM" these are also feeds. Similarly it might have a button that says things like "click to subscribe" or "click to subscribe in fireant", "click to subscribe in" some other program.

This link points to the RSS feed. If you click on it it probably loads a page of XML (text with tags around it). Don't worry about that, but the URL in the browser window is the URL of the feed. The best RSS clients (web based and standalone) let you put in the URL of the page itself, and it 'sniffs' out any RSS for you.

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RSS Trouble Shooting

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WordPress is Putting in More than One Enclosure

Aka, why aren't my enclosures working in WordPress?

OK, this problem is usually related to WordPress version 1.5 or thereabouts (scroll to the bottom of your admin screen in your blog and you'll see which version you're using). What happens is that WordPress automatically adds an enclosure element to your blog posts (even when you don't ask for one). It does this by reading your embed tag. Now it seems to work fine if you don't use poster movies so the only thing is an embed tag with a src="address of video" or src="address of audio" but if you use poster movies, include a href in the embed tag, and so on it just goes silly. (This silliness is usually easily spotted - it keeps adding more and more enclosure tags to the individual blog post - there should only be one!)

To solve this you can upgrade your blog to a more recent version of WordPress. Or, you can edit one line in one file in your blog installation.

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Editing functions.php to Stop RSS with Enclosures in WordPress

A complicated heading. The explanation. WordPress 1.5 automatically reads for media files and adds them as enclosures to your RSS. There are several reasons why this might be a problem but generally it breaks RSS if you try and do anything apart from very plain embedding of media in your posts. To get round this you can 'turn off' the script that automatically does this in WordPress 1.5, which then lets you manually control these things. You need to follow these steps very carefully.

  1. launch fugu or cyberduck and log in to your blog account
  2. inside the blog folder there is a folder called wp-includes, open that
  3. inside wp-includes is a file called functions.php copy this file to your local computer
  4. open functions.php in BBedit Lite or TextWrangler (both free and both able to installed by you if they are not on the lab computers)
  5. you will see a lot of code that you probably won't understand (it is php which is a scripting language)
  6. Apple - f (or command f) will open the find dialog box, you can also find it (find) under a menu)
  7. type in preg_match_all and hit enter (make sure you are searching from the top)
  8. IMPORTANT: this text appears several times so make sure you find the right one!
  9. To repeat the search use Apple - g (that is hold down apple key and press 'g' at same time), this will always repeat the last search
  10. do this until you find a line that begins with preg_match_all then there will be a ( and shortly afterwards some text that simply says http
  11. this is a search string, replace http with httt or hppp
  12. save the file as functions.php
  13. put it pack where you got it from on your blog
  14. now WordPress will NOT automatically add enclosures, you need to do that manually.

You will find a discussion of this at http://wordpress.org/support/topic/26311

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RSS, General Questions

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How Many Enclosures Can There Be per Post?

For each RSS feed there should only be one enclosure per post.

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