Podcasts: Description Tags
With the increasing popularity of iTunes for publishing and subscribing to podcasts, more and more podcasters are creating RSS feeds that meet the iTunes technical specification.
As many podcasters will be aware, the iTunes specification includes additional tags to the standard RSS 2.0 specification that are specific to the application. However, not all the RSS feeds comply with the specifications for both iTunes and standard RSS 2.0.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with the description tag. Unfortunately, the published iTunes example omits the standard description tag altogether for items (podcasts). Following this example, a podcast description will certainly show up in iTunes but nowhere else!
This is most evident in podcatcher software, news aggregators and in RSS feeds converted into HTML for web pages. Here the content for the description will be blank because the description tag is empty, or worse, not even present at all as outlined above.
If you produce podcasts and generate your RSS feed yourself or via other software, it is worth ensuring that both sets of description tags are completed with the same information - otherwise there will be some frustrated users out there!
As many podcasters will be aware, the iTunes specification includes additional tags to the standard RSS 2.0 specification that are specific to the application. However, not all the RSS feeds comply with the specifications for both iTunes and standard RSS 2.0.
Nowhere is this more apparent than with the description tag. Unfortunately, the published iTunes example omits the standard description tag altogether for items (podcasts). Following this example, a podcast description will certainly show up in iTunes but nowhere else!
This is most evident in podcatcher software, news aggregators and in RSS feeds converted into HTML for web pages. Here the content for the description will be blank because the description tag is empty, or worse, not even present at all as outlined above.
If you produce podcasts and generate your RSS feed yourself or via other software, it is worth ensuring that both sets of description tags are completed with the same information - otherwise there will be some frustrated users out there!
posted by Dave Jobbings at 2:20 PM
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