Exercise 3 Tutorial - Create an RSS Feed

Your assignment is to create a RSS feed based on content from your podcast series. In other words, you will create an RSS feed that points to your mp3 files. Use the RSS feed sample (edit575_su09.txt) file to use as a template to edit for your own RSS feed. Point it to the audio or video file for your first episode. Validate your RSS feed/file and upload the finished RSS feed (.xml file) to the designated web space along with your Episode 1 audio/video file. Subscribe to your feed using iTunes U or another podcatcher tool/RSS reader. Finally, email me a link to your RSS feed i.e., the .xml file. Consult the screen movie for this exercise.

STEP 1: The MP3 File

1. You have created a podcast in Week 3/Module 3 and exported and saved it as .mp3, .m4a, or .m4v to your local computer
2. Upload this file to a server using FTP:
   • You can use your own server space if you have one (Mason's web server cluster does not support uploading your multimedia files but you can upload the RSS (.xml) file you create in Movement 2). The GSE server has worked for students in the past.
   • If you don't have a web server space, try using the Internet Archives to upload and store your multimedia files.
     • Upload files here: http://www.archive.org/create/
     • Copy the link to your file location when the upload is complete.
     • Bookmark the page (link on right sidepanel), then bookmark your IA bookmarks to find this page again.

STEP 2: The RSS Feed

1. How to Edit RSS podcast feed
   • You should have read about what RSS is and how to format an RSS feed in Farkas, Chapter 5: p.225-237 and others.
2. Download the RSS feed template (575.txt) from RSS Feed folder on the Homepage
• Do Not Open the file by Double clicking on the File -- Instead, Open using Notepad to edit it.
3. Edit the RSS feed template and replace the contents in between the tags with your podcast information
• I have color coded all the content items that you need to change with your information. Some you can make up, but others need to be exact, such as the day and date.
  • Enclosure element:
    • To get your audio file size in bytes -- right-click on file, and go to Properties and grab the number of bytes on the Size line and omit the commas.
    • Make sure you have the right media MIME type extensions

File	Type
.mp3	audio/mpeg
.m4a	audio/x-m4a
.mp4	video/mp4
.m4v	video/x-m4v
.mov	video/quicktime
.pdf	application/pdf

4. Save the File as a text file and then do a Save As to create a file with ANYNAME.xml -- be sure to append with .xml
5. Upload the .xml file to your server space.
6. Validate the feed using FeedValidator.org - type the URL to your xml file into this tool to find out if your xml code has any serious errors that will prevent it from working.
7. Email me your finished RSS feed .

STEP 3: The Blue Dot Test

1. Now that you have created your RSS feed, published it to a server, and validated it, you should test your feed to see if it works within iTunes.
2. Open up iTunes
3. Click on Advanced > Subscribe to Podcast
4. If you can't get yours to validate, you can try it with the address of my test feed: Example: http://mason.gmu.edu/~rreo/575.xml
5. If you see a blue dot appear next to your podcast... then Yeah!