RSS Feed

Santa Claus

A mate of mine runs an internet radio show and he has an archive of his shows where people can download them so I created an RSS feed which links to them so we could put them up as podcasts.
I checked that the RSS feed is valid using www.feedvalidator.org and it's happy with it but when I try to submit this to iTunes it says that "the feed has no episodes".

I've used the following layout in the RSS feed

<item>
<title></title>
<description></description>
<link></link>
<guid></guid>
</item>

Anyone any idea what I need to do for apple to see episodes ?

aidan_walsh

Can we see an example of the full feed, including sample data and headers?

Santa Claus

I've left out a few of the items to save repetition.



<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"&gt;

<channel>

<atom:link href="http://www.oloradio.co.uk/ojr/OJRFEED.xml&quot; rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" />

<title>Old Jock Radio</title>
<description>A selection of some previous OJR shows. Dont forget to tune in live on Thursday nights at 9 by putting radio.oldjockradio.com into winamp or realplayer !</description>
<link>http://www.oldjockradio.com</link&gt;

<item>
<title>OJR 11th October 2007</title>
<description>Rich is back on the show but has turned up with a nasty dose of the cold. Les does his best keep his spirits up in this classic edition of the show.</description>
<link>http://www.oloradio.co.uk/ojr/OJR11OCTLESRICH.mp3</link&gt;
<guid>http://www.oloradio.co.uk/ojr/OJR11OCTLESRICH.mp3</guid&gt;
</item>


</channel>

</rss>

Santa Claus

Anyone any ideas on this guys ??

aidan_walsh

You start specifying an RSS feed and then start adding Atom elements. If the Apple parser is looking for a pure RSS feed, the Atom elements could be confusing it.

Santa Claus

aidan_walsh wrote: »

You start specifying an RSS feed and then start adding Atom elements. If the Apple parser is looking for a pure RSS feed, the Atom elements could be confusing it.

This was my first attempt at an RSS feed and www.feedvalidator.org told me I needed to add the bit about ATOM to make it a valid feed.

Are episodes just items in apple speak ?

aidan_walsh

Are episodes just items in apple speak ?

Should be.

Try using a feed formatted more like this

<rss version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>Old Jock Radio</title>
    <link>http://www.oldjockradio.com</link>
    <description>A selection of some previous OJR shows. Dont forget to tune in live on Thursday nights at 9 by putting radio.oldjockradio.com into winamp or realplayer !</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
 
    <item>
      <title>OJR 11th October 2007</title>
      <link>http://www.oloradio.co.uk/ojr/OJR11OCTLESRICH.mp3</link>
      <description>Rich is back on the show but has turned up with a nasty dose of the cold. Les does his best keep his spirits up in this classic edition of the show.</description>
      <pubDate>Sun, 11 Oct 2007 09:39:21 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>http://www.oloradio.co.uk/ojr/OJR11OCTLESRICH.mp3</guid>
    </item>
   </channel>
</rss>

Santa Claus

Thanks for that Aidan, maybe the pubdate is what apple need for episodes.
By taking out the XML ref from the file can I still use a xml file extension or do I call it just .rss ?

aidan_walsh

By rights the XML version should go at the top, but most readers should process the file if you use either the XML or RSS extension. They should look at the contents of the data itself and validate\parse against that.

aidan_walsh

After a quick look on Google (couldn't do it earlier, was writing while at work), I found this article that explains all that Apple need, and includes a sample feed.