Creating the Podcast

Written by: Dr. Steve Yuen

Podcasting is simply an RSS feed that contains an MP3 or audio file in the enclosure tag. RSS files define a channel that contains items. The channel provides meta information about your RSS feed, and describes the your show as a whole. Items are the content of the channel, your individual programs. Each item provides information about one podcast, in MP3 format, located on your Web server.

Creating RSS feeds manually is relatively easy. You can open your text editor or note pad and enter the feed using the following sample. You may want to copy the following sample and past it in your text editor. Be sure to replace the red text where you want you own content and save the file with an extension xml.

RSS Feed Example

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<rss version="2.0">
<channel>
<title>Dr. Steve Yuen's Podcast Central - IT 780</title>
<link>http://dragon.ep.usm.edu/~yuen/podcast/</link>
<description>IT 780 Podcasting site from Dr. Yuen</description>
<language>en-us</language>
<copyright>2006 - Dr. Steve Yuen</copyright>
<webMaster>steve.yuen@usm.edu</webMaster>
<item>
<title>Podcasting in Education</title>
<description>Using Podcasting in teaching and learning</description>
<enclosure url="http://dragon.ep.usm.edu/~yuen/podcast/it780/podcast_in_education.mp3" length="4599570" type="audio/mp3"/>
</item>
</channel>
</rss>

As you can see, the above RSS feed sample shows only 1 items (podcast) in the channel. You can add additional items (podcasts) in the channel. To add a second item, you need to copy the code between <item> and </item> and change the specifics. The title in the item section is the name of the unique episode of your podcast. The links points to the Web page that discusses this individual show. The description is a good place to note what the podcast is about. In the enclosure tag, the URL value is the server location of the file; length is the file size in bytes; and type is the file type and format (i.e., audio/mp3, video/mpg).

After you create your RSS file, you should upload it to your Web account. Also, it is a good idea to test the RSS feed to make sure it is valid before publishing it. There are several validation services available online. I recommend you validate your RSS feeds using these two FREE validation services (RSS Validator or W3C Feed Validation Service, for Atom and RSS). Just paste in your RSS feed's URL and submit, and the sites will validate your RSS file. After you've validated your feed, you can publish it publicly. Post it to a public area of your site, and provide a link to it.

Creating the Podcast

RSS Feed Example

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