A neat use of RSS that I completely forgot to mention in my CocoaRadio interview is appcasting (and I am absolutely kicking myself).

Appcasting is a term coined by Fraser Speirs to describe the delivery of software via RSS. It works the same as podcasting: the RSS enclosure tag is used to point to the downloadable file but instead of an audio file, this is an application.

I’ve been running an appcasting feed for Reinvented Software since releasing Feeder in February 2005. However, the coolest implementation of appcasting in the whole world is Sparkle.

Sparkle is a Cocoa framework by Andy Matuschak that can make applications self-updating, uses appcasting to discover new updates, displays release notes and plenty more. It is made available under a MIT license. Even better, Feeder is recommended in the documentation. 😀

I have been planning to switch my apps over to Sparkle for some time now and it’s next on my list, honest.

Creating an Appcasting Feed with Feeder

To create an appcasting feed you will need to tweak Feeder’s default template a little. Here’s how to create a new feed, whether or not you are using Sparkle:

• Choose File > New Feed from the menu.
  • Enter the name of the feed (e.g. “Feeder Updates”).
  • Put the URL of your software’s product page in the Link field.
  • Put something appropriate in the Description.
• Click Continue.
  • With the Default template selected, click the Customize button.
  • Check the checkbox next to the Enclosure fields.
  • Click Save.
• Click Continue.
  • Check the filename and location of the feed is right for you and click Finish. A new item window will open.

Tip: if you keep a copy of your site on disk, and would prefer to save the feed in the structure of that site rather than in Feeder’s library, use Choose Another Location and select the folder where you want the feed kept. You should also enter a web-friendly filename in this case.

Editing a New Version

Each item in the feed refers to a new version of your software. You can create new items in your feed by clicking New Item in the toolbar.

• Enter the name of update in the Title field (e.g. “Feeder 1.3.4 Released”).
• Enter a link to your software’s product page or wherever in the Link field – you need to enter some sort of link or the feed won’t work in Firefox’s Live Bookmarks or OmniWeb.
• Click the disclosure arrow next to Enclosure field to show the enclosure fields.
  • Drag and drop your downloadable file (Sparkle supports zip, tar, tbz, tgz, or dmg) onto the enclosure area to have Feeder upload it when you publish your feed.
  • Alternatively you can enter the URL, click the action menu to the right of the URL field and choose Fetch Attributes from Web (or Fetch Attributes from File if it’s not yet online) to get the type and the length.
• Enter the release notes in HTML in the Description field.
• Close the item window to save the item.

You can then either click Publish in the toolbar to upload your feed or if you don’t want to publish your feed with Feeder, the XML file is always up to date on disk – you can just drag the feed from Feeder to your FTP client, command line or wherever to upload.

And if you’re a developer and using Feeder, or thinking of using it, I’d love to hear from you. Leave a comment or email steve at this domain. Thanks!

Feeder is an RSS editor, not a weblog editor like ecto or MarsEdit. All modern blogs produce their own feeds. However, RSS feeds created by Feeder can compliment a blog in a number of ways and Feeder itself has some tricks for working with other RSS feeds.

Suggested Uses

There are a number of reason why people include separate RSS feeds on their weblog. These are some real world examples:

• Creating different feeds, possibly with slightly modified content for a specific audience. One example is this Tips & Tricks feed.
• Creating a separate podcast feed with iTunes tags that only contains podcasts and not general blog entries. This has the advantage of providing more control over the number of episodes that appear in your podcast feed, enclosures files, etc.
• Syndicating content by creating RSS feeds of interesting articles for friends and family.

Downloading a Weblog Feed

Feeder can read your most recent entries from your blog’s RSS feed. Your weblog must generate RSS 0.9x or 2.0 feeds (as opposed to RSS 1.0 or Atom feeds).

To download your blog’s feed into Feeder:

1. Click on the New Feed button in the toolbar and choose Download Feed.
2. Enter the URL of your blog (e.g. https://reinventedsoftware.com/blog/) you don’t need to enter the full feed URL as Feeder will try to auto-detect the feed.
3. If successful, the feed will now be selected in Feeder’s sidebar.

Copying Items

To use items (individual posts) from your blog feed in another feed you can just drag the item from one feed to the other feed in the sidebar. You can also cut and paste items between feeds.

Reloading a Weblog Feed

After adding and changing new posts on your blog, the feed in Feeder will get out of step. You can quickly get the latest version of your blog’s entries by clicking on the Reload button in the toolbar.

Adding the Feed to Your Blog

You can publish your non-blog feed anywhere you like and put a link on the blog to the Feeder-generated feed, if necessary. How to do this is entirely dependant on the weblog system you are using.

If you are using WordPress 2 you can add an RSS widget to your blog’s sidebar. You can find out more about WordPress widgets here.

Adding Items from an RSS Reader

If you use an RSS reader application that uses the External Weblog Editor Interface, you can send news items to the selected feed in Feeder.

To do that, you need to set Feeder as the Weblog editor in the reader application, and use the reader app’s Post to Weblog (or equivalent) command to send those items to Feeder.

NetNewsWire, NewsFire and NewsLife all support this.

Feeder also supports the RSS clipboard format, which means you can drag and drop or copy and paste news items from a reader application to Feeder.

Thank you to everyone who has told me they find the Feeder Tips & Tricks feed useful. It seems to be going well. Ironic that it’s taken me all this time to realise that a feed for this sort of thing would be a great use of Feeder and RSS!

I have many more tips lined up, but they can take a while to write. I choose the topics based on support feedback or things I think are worth mentioning, so if anyone has any requests please leave a comment here or use the support pages to get in touch. Thanks!

Here are some tips for editing items in Feeder.

Autocompletion

Feeder can autocomplete from other items in your feed, email addresses from Address Book and so on. You can enable or disable this feature in Feeder’s Editing preferences.

If you don’t want auto-completion on all the time, you can still get an auto-completion list by hitting Option-Esc or F5 after typing some text.

Working with Tags

You can use the Insert HTML menu in the toolbar to insert HTML tags into the description. If text is selected, Feeder surrounds the text in the tag. If no text is selected, Feeder places the cursor between the two tags.

Feeder has keystrokes for some frequently used tags, which you can see in the menu. The keystrokes are fairly standard, such as Command-B for a <b> bold tag.

Editing Images and Links

You can insert the HTML for images and links using the Image and Link buttons in the toolbar, when the cursor is in the Description field at the bottom of the window.

You can also edit existing images and links by selecting the whole tag before clicking the Image or Link buttons.

Feeder also keeps the last 10 recent images and links inserted. Just click on the Recents button next to the URL.

For images, you can use quickly retrieve the dimensions of the image, and constrain the proportions of the image using the action menu next to the height and width. Specifying the image size can help with layout problems that can occur in Safari.

Paste Link

This is a really handy feature. If you have a URL on the clipboard, you can quickly create a link by hitting Command-Shift-K.

Credit: This was actually a feature request by someone who was addicted to this functionality in MarsEdit.

Ever heard the expression “lighting someone else’s flame doesn’t diminish your own” (or something like that)? I’ve been having a conversation with Allison Sheridan from NosillaCast about this. Jonathan from the Mac Tips Daily Podcast told Allison to check out Podcast Maker as an alternative to Feeder for creating her podcast. Allison said she would, but felt awkward since she was happy with Feeder and the support she had received from me.

Now, as it happened, Potion Factory‘s Andy Kim told me that this was on Allison’s show (even though I’m still subscribed to Allison’s podcast, I have a backlog, OK!). I often talk with Andy, we’re good friends. I met both Andy and Jin at the Podcast Expo. Coincidentally, Allison wrote to me the very same day with a support question, so I mentioned in my reply that I had heard the show and told her exactly what I thought of Podcast Maker.

I think it’s brilliant and well worth checking out.

Feeder and Podcast Maker are very different products that happen to do similar things. The clues are in the names: Podcast Maker is dedicated to (surprise!) making podcasts. Feeder does podcasting, but is also a generic RSS feed editor. Both applications have their unique features. Podcast Maker is probably easier to use thanks to its focus on doing one thing and doing it well. Feeder may be more flexible, because it’s designed for a variety of different uses.

Of the two applications’ overall capabilities I bet there isn’t much in it, but frankly I haven’t done a comprehensive feature comparison to find out. I give Feeder users what I think they need, whether that is something frequently requested or an idea of my own. I expect Andy and Jin work on the same basis. How you implement these things is what makes all the difference.

I believe there is more to Mac applications than ticking boxes. Of course, Mac users care that an application does what they need, but they also want something that appeals to them on an emotional level. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve bought an app because I like it more than its competitors, regardless of whether it has as many features.

Same with Macs. I’ve always liked iMacs and all-in-one Macs in general. Yes, a Power Mac would be faster, more upgradeable, I could get a bigger monitor and it could double as a cheese grater, but I don’t care. The iMac is cute, a brilliant design and does everything I need perfectly. Obviously not everyone thinks the same as me, or Apple wouldn’t need to make any other desktop Macs.

Anyway, I digress. A man of many tangents, me.

Allison wrote back and told me that, if it were her, she might worry that plugging another podcast could take listeners away. It’s a good point, I had never thought of it from a podcaster’s perspective. True, people don’t need to make a purchasing decision between one podcast and another, because they’re all freely available, but listeners only have a finite amount of listening time.

But think about it, many of the most successful podcasters promote other podcasts on a regular basis. You plug a podcast you enjoy and they can mention you in return. It’s not mandatory, but both of you can gain listeners as a result of that extra exposure. It’s social networking, like a trackback on a blog, but it’s also word of mouth – the greatest marketing tool in the world.

The real point is this: it’s not as if someone can’t search for tech podcasts just as easily as they can search for podcast-creation software. There are all sorts of things out there: costly all-in-one solutions, bundled iLife applications, freeware, shareware, online services, you name it. And there will be more. To pretend these things don’t exist is futile.

Competition is good because it raises standards (or should!) and increases overall exposure. By mentioning Podcast Maker on her show, Allison also mentioned Feeder. People will make up their own minds. As for developers, and this could apply to anyone, it’s often so much better to work together than apart – a personal favourite example being the work we did in trying to sort out the iTunes specification.

My inspiration in this regard is NetNewsWire‘s Brent Simmons. Never afraid to mention his competitors, put source code out there, discuss all sort of things and open up his applications’ functionality for others to use (see the NetNewsWire developers page), Brent sets an excellent example for all developers – and just look how popular NetNewsWire is!

Indie developers are not like supermarkets, selling the same stuff at different prices. Our products should set us apart in a number of ways or we’re not trying hard enough.

So, the moral of the story is to share the love! It will always be good for you. 😉