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

Feeder got a mention on the July 9th show of the MacCast podcast in a section about creating RSS feeds for podcasting. The show’s presenter, Adam Christianson, is a Feeder user and it’s great to see the MacCast is frequently in the iTunes Podcasts Top 20 and Podcast Alley‘s Top 10.

Cheers Adam and well done!

Well, wrap me in plastic and call me Laura! Softpedia has certified Feeder 1.1.3 100% spyware clean and if you don’t believe me, you can see for yourself here.

I don’t own a PC, haven’t really used one for two years. Every now and again, I get a little reminder of what it’s like in WindowsWorld: the reminders are never very nice.

Apologies for the lack of updates to the blog recently. Mostly this is because I’m busy, but also my site has been seeing a lot more traffic since the iTunes podcasting release and my server had a few creaky moments last week; I didn’t want to add the the problem.

I released Feeder 1.1.3 today. This doesn’t include the iTunes extensions and is mostly a bug fix release to clear the decks before version 1.2, which I now expect to be ready by early August. I have updated the main site to reflect this.

In the meantime, I’ve designed the interface for 1.2 and estimated how long it will take to produce and test. It won’t just be an iTunes-related release either. There are a few other things going in there that either have been requested and promised or which will make support work easier (such as an FTP log). It does mean that some of the things I’d hoped to get in there will be postponed, but that’s OK because nobody has asked for them yet.

Sam Ruby, one of the authors of FeedValidator, is threatening to throw up an Undecipherable (sic) Specification Error if the validator encounters the <itunes:block>, <itunes:image> or <itunes:link> tags.

In Feeder I will implement all tags as per the example feed shown in Apple’s specification, but there is not an example for the tag. The purpose of this tag is to prevent a show or podcast from appearing in the iTunes Music Store but there is no available information on how this is supposed to work. It could be…

<itunes :block />

…so that its presence indicates the item or feed should be blocked. It could be…

<itunes :block>Yes</itunes:block>
<itunes:block>No</itunes>

…as appropriate to indicate clearly the purpose of the tag or it could be something completely different. Until we find out, the option will remain disabled in Feeder. I don’t see this as a huge problem, because most people will be using these tags so that their show can be listed nicely in the iTunes Music Store. If FeedValidator throws up that indecipherable specification error for those tags mentioned above, it probably won’t be long until things become more clear.

Note also that your feed will work without any of these tags in the iTunes Music Store, it just doesn’t look as cool.