August 1st, 2005 by Steve Harris
I released Feeder 1.2 with the new iTunes podcasting features last Friday, a little earlier than planned but it couldn’t come soon enough for most people. The response so far has been overwhelmingly positive.
For the beta testing, I needed the help of people already listed in the iTunes Music Store both to test that the XML was working and to test Feeder’s cool iTunes Preview feature matched iTunes itself. As such I’d like to thank those people who put their listings on the line (I didn’t quite put it like that at the time, did I?) to test out Feeder, namely:
All the links above are to their listings in the iTMS so you can see Feeder’s work in situ, subscribe, enjoy, etc. 😀
Also thanks to Björk for keeping me awake for the last 30-hour stint <rolleyes>. I needed some music that I hadn’t heard in ages and even more I’d never heard at all.
It also should be noted that Sam Ruby and Mark Pilgrim’s work on FeedValidator, posts on Intertwingly and the new Apple Syndication Dev mailing list has been incredibly useful. We know Apple has the questions, all we need now are answers.
Now that mad dash to the finish line is over, I no longer need to obsess over the minutiae of the iTunes RSS specification and I’ve caught up with my sleep, I’m going to be able to post more interesting things on this blog.
Stay tuned!
July 28th, 2005 by Steve Harris
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.
July 22nd, 2005 by Steve Harris
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. 😀
July 22nd, 2005 by Steve Harris
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!
July 19th, 2005 by Steve Harris
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
