Automatic Delivery of work-in-progress to Clients: Part 2 - Creating the RSS Feed.

The secret to automatic delivery is the RSS feed - a relatively simple file that software like iTunes will read and recognize new additions. Those additions are then automatically downloaded to iTunes and optionally synchronized with an iPod that supports video.

The thing that differentiates a podcast from a regular downloadable audio file - the kind we've had for more than seven years already - and makes this automated delivery work is the RSS file that automates delivery of the "most recent" content. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary depending on which source you read. An RSS file is used for delivering blog content, news headlines and, over the last year, media enclosure files like audio (podcasts) and video (vlogcast, video podcast etc.). It's that last feature we're going to use to deliver our content automatically to our client as the versions are updated.

When you create a podcast, i.e. an RSS file with an enclosure, the RSS reader (iTunes) searches for new updates however often the user has set their preferences - every few minutes, every hour, every few hours, daily or once a week).

All producer or editor has to do is create the new “podcast episode” (in this case a new version of an edit) and post it. The reviewer or client then simply checks in with their RSS reader or iTunes to see the spot. You could send an email to the client to alert them, but the spot will be automatically download to the client’s computer without any intervention. That’s what RSS is all about.

While it's possible to create the RSS file in any text editor, that's the hard way now that there are many free or low cost tools to create an iTunes compatible RSS feed. Once created the RSS file usually goes at the root level of your website. The address to this file is what is given to the client to "subscribe to".

Generating an RSS file

How To Prepare Your Podcast RSS for iTunes is a good basic introduction with examples of the tags that go into an RSS file. Notice how similar the tags are to regular HTML tags? Same basic idea.

FeedForAll allows users to easily create, edit and publish RSS feeds

Feeder is an application for creating, editing and publishing RSS feeds on Mac OS X. With Feeder you don't need to understand RSS to create feeds and publish them to the web.

Podcast RSS Buddy 3.0 is an easy way to create feeds.

In each of these tools, the URL for the enclosure will be the file you encoded and uploaded in Step 1.

Once the file is complete load it to your website and give out the URL to your clients. The URL will look something like this:

http://digitalproductionbuzz.com/archives.xml

This is the URL for Creative Planet's Digital Production BuZZ show and includes the most recent shows in subscription form.

Next: Subscribing to the feed.