Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
So this month we will cover how to create your RSS feed, to push your audio directly to the pod-catchers of those people who subscribe to the feed to receive updates as you publish new content. First, a warning about setting up the feed for your audio. Although the audio is going to be hosted elsewhere (and not actually on the Blog servers), you are limited to a grand total of 1MB of data (yes, less than an old 3.5” floppy’s amount of data) for each post being fed via feedburner. If you go over this, the post will not get fed to people subscribed to the feed; it is easy to breach the 1MB limit even with just a long set of show notes without any pictures. This caused me endless frustration when I started to publish the Distrohoppers Digest pages. I was trying to push the feed without success – until, after quite a bit of Googling, I was able to find out what the problem was. As a result, I now publish the show notes as a separate page, with a link after the first paragraph to ….’more’ on the actual Blog post. This allows more text and images if needed, and as this is not on the feed, the page size should be well under the 1MB limit, allowing the feed to be processed.
Ce mois-ci, nous allons donc nos intéresser à la création d'une alimentation RSS, pour pousser directement votre audio vers les « pod-catchers » de ces gens qui ont souscrit à cette alimentation pour recevoir les mises à jour quand vous publiez un nouveau contenu.
OK, let's look at setting up your Feed. First, you will need a link to where your audio is stored, either on your self-hosted server, or to the audio stored on archive.org as we do with Distrohoppers and mintCast. If using archive.org, you may want to consider a small monthly donation to them to offset some of their hosting costs; while it is not compulsory to do this, if you are donating 1£/2$ per month, this is 12£/$24 per year, and that is good value for hosting; other service providers start at around $5/month, $60/year. Setting up an account with archive.org is as simple as providing an email address and password, and, if using it for podcast hosting, you can use the email created for the Blogger account. We will look at this further in a future article. So, to be able to publish the feed, you need to link your Blog to Feedburner, so navigate to feedburner.com from your google account and you should come to this page. As you can see, there are already a number of feeds in the list for my blogs, but we want to create one for our ‘Test Blog’ which has the address of ‘testtonyh1212.blogspot.com’. To create a feed address for this blog, we need to create a new feed. Under the list is the message: “Burn a feed right this instant. Type your blog or feed address here:” in the box below this, put in the blog’s web address and tick the box that says ‘I am a podcaster’. Click next, and you will see this box with the options to make an atom or RSS feed, check the RSS feed. Then click next, and you should have successfully created your feed address which will be showing in the box on the screen.
If you wish, you can just skip straight to managing the feed. At this point, while you are here, you might as well set up the finer points of the feed such as how iTunes will see the feed and key words to assist people finding your content. The picture shown right shows this process in one image including now being able to see the feed on your Feedburner home screen; Test is now the Second Blog listed. So you now have feedburner set up with an RSS address that you will use later to set up the feed on your Blog. In my case the test Blog feed reads like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/PSYbSL, with the end PSYbSL being the unique identifier for the feed. It is this full http://feeds… address that we will be using when we create the Feed ‘Gadget’ for your Blog’s home page, so our next step is to navigate to our Blogger account and start setting up the feed. On the left-hand of your Blogger page will be the menu with all the options to create a new post, etc; navigate to the ‘Layout’ and open this; you will be presented with something like this (shown above), you may need to scroll down a little to see the right-hand sidebar.
Click on the ‘Add a Gadget’ and this screen (shown right) opens. Again you may need to scroll down to see the ‘Feed’ section. Click the ‘+’ to open the dialogue box to add your feed details. The following picture is a compilation of following the screens to create the Gadget. After putting in the Feedburner address we created earlier, we then put in our title for the feed and preference for the number of posts that will be seen by pod-catchers, the maximum being five. Save this and the Gadget now shows in the Layout; if you now navigate to the Blog home page, you should see the title you gave the feed next to RSS. So now anyone with the feed URL that you put into the Gadget will be able to subscribe to that in their pod-catcher, and every time you create a new Blog with audio linked in it, they will have that audio or a link to it pushed to their pod-catcher. Next time, I will go through uploading your audio to archive.org and then linking this in your blog post each time you record a new episode.