Apologies if you’ve tried to reach this site and been met with some awful spammy placeholder page. I paid Tektonic, my hosting company, to renew my domain at the beginning of this month, but it seems the renewal wasn’t submitted and thus the site went offline.

Awful timing, for 101 different reasons.

Anyway, it’s back now. Thanks to everybody who let me know, particularly Jerry Musser, who was the first to break the news. Also, Tektonic’s support is very professional and responsive – thankfully. Hopefully this won’t happen again.

My first reaction to seeing that Microsoft has chosen “Vista” as the release name for Longhorn was to look for something more interesting to read. While it’s an improvement on XP (for eXPerience – kinda funny, actually, since it really is quite an experience) it’s all rather bland and appears to be wholly inaccurate. All that marketing clout, all those millions of dollars and Microsoft hasn’t come up with a decent name or codename for any of their releases that I know of. It’s all cattle and sell-by dates (funny that).

So, I think Erik hit the nail on the head in his QotD. My thoughts exactly. Thankfully, it doesn’t matter whether or not I like the name because I don’t have to care. 😀

Feeder has been getting quite a bit of attention lately (can’t think why!), and there’s more coming in the near future…

Oliver Bredenback at Boinx Software has published an excellent article (biased, moi?) on How to Create Podcasts with .Mac.

Paul Figgiani mentions Feeder on ThePoint Podcast No. 38.

Mark Reid talks about Feeder on show No. 2 of The Mac Report podcast.

Jason O’Grady writes about Feeder on O’Grady’s PowerPage as he prepares for his podcast.

In Sweden, on MacPro’s website (thought I’m not really sure what it says, it looks innocuous enough!).

Feeder is was mentioned in the Cool Mac Picks segment of Inside Mac Radio on July 23rd.

Thank you, everybody!

FeedValidator has been updated for the latest iTunes spec. See this post for a few interesting things of note about that spec by Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim.

An important point is that thanks to omissions in the new spec, you need to have the old spec if you want to have all the information and it’s no longer available on Apple’s site. For example, it doesn’t have the list of categories and subcategories, or mention the tag in the summary table at the top.

In addition to the comments there, it’s struck me that the description of the tag itself implies that it should only be applied at the channel level and not to individual items. This would make sense since iTunes doesn’t do anything with an image specific to a particular show/item, only the podcast/channel as a whole, but do we know for sure? Er, no.

This new revision is much better, but that wouldn’t be difficult, and yet it seems that where the first version did well this one has let itself down and vice versa. It remains a moving target for anyone trying to make sense of it all.

Tags: iTunes, Podcasting

A much more clear, consistent and readable specification for the iTunes RSS Specification is now available, dated 7/7/2005:

http://phobos.apple.com/static/iTunesRSS.html

I had a sneak preview of this the other day and it’s certainly a lot better than the last one. I’m still not entirely sure how the tag should work, but with Feeder I’m now working on the assumption that it’s empty and that its presence blocks a channel or item from appearing in the music store. E.g.:

<itunes :block />

Tags: iTunes, Feeder, Podcasting