[kwlug-disc] Podcast, phase 02

[Paul Nijjar]

http://kwlug.org/podcasts

I am not making the RSS feeds properly. In particular, I am not using
enclosure tags like the rest of the world (in particular Darcy and
Bevan from Kwartzlab, who also use archive.org for their hosting)
manage to do. However, the feed validates and seems to work in
gpodder. I presume that means it will work everywhere, but feel free
to prove me wrong. 

Getting enclosures correct means parsing the metadata file from
archive.org, which is doable but requires downloading and parsing
files (and somehow not doing so on every page hit if possible). The
consequence is that the files show up as having zero size, but they
still download for me okay.

You really don't want to look at the hideous hackery that I engaged in
to put this together. Podcast feeds are hard in Drupal! The
views_rss_itunes module helped, but I still needed to come up with
ugly custom fields, override the theming for those fields (to get the
embedded player working), and try to squish them together in views. I
feel bad for the poor sap who has to upgrade this website to Drupal 7. 

I do not have an iTunes account, but it should be possible to
subscribe this feed to iTunes. First we should ensure a few things: 

- That the podcast actually works in people's podcatchers
- That somebody actually keeps the podcast updated each month. Most
  podcasts fail before three episodes have passed, supposedly. 
- That the metadata fields are "good enough". I am open to improving
  these.
- That the podcast quality is "good enough". 


Things that are broken: 
- No enclosure fields
- The embedded player does not work in all browsers. In my Iceweasel
  the embedded player wants to download the file, not play it. But it
  works on other computers.
- There should not be HTML elements in descriptions and iTunes summary
  fields, but I do not know how to get Views to strip them
  appropriately.
- Podcasts are not linked to their meeting agenda or topic pages (and
  this will probably never happen automatically).
- The big icon for iTunes is not exactly 1400x1400 px . 

- Paul 

-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org