Customising your Podcast feed

The Hubb platform includes an RSS feed to all the audio and video recordings that you publish on your web site. This feed is often referred to as a 'podcast', and can be used to download the latest media published to your site automatically making it easy for users to keep up-to-date with your media content.

Your podcast feed is generated automatically from the media files you upload so you don't need to do anything to publish it. It's possible however to customise this feed to control what it displays. For example you can choose what types of files appear in the feed and how many e.g. you may wish to display only the latest 20 uploaded media files. It's now possible to customise the meta data of your 'podcast' allowing you to specify what's displayed in the popular iTunes digital media player and iTunes store. The meta data that can be edited includes: Title, Description, Author, Image and others.

To customise your iTunes podcast you will first need to create a customised feed. If you haven't done this already you can do so as follows:

• Login to the Web Office and select the 'Settings' tab.
• From the left-hand side navigation select the 'API's' category and then choose the 'Media XML' option. Once this is selected you should see the work pane refresh to display the 'Media XML' page.
• Select the 'Add a new media feed' task, located at the bottom of the page.
• You should now see your new media feed's properties. Select 'Format 5 - iTunes Podcast' from the 'XML Format' drop-down list if you wish to produce a feed that's fully compatible with the iTunes player.
• Now select the folder location that includes the media you wish to display in your podcast feed. If you wish to display all the media recordings on your site you can leave your root folder selected and choose the 'Include media subfolders' and 'Include subgroups' options.
• The 'RSS fields' and 'iTunes fields' can be used to customise the meta data for your feed. This meta data is used in the display of your feed in both the iTunes store and in the iTunes media player. The help icon next to each feed will give more details on what each item represents.
• iTunes have recently changed their recommendations for image sizes and now recommend an image 3000 pixels square.
• Finally select the types of media that you wish to include in your feed. If the iTunes format has been selected then only file types supported by iTunes are included, so you could simply click 'all' to select all the valid file types.
• Click 'Save' at the top right of the page to commit your changes.

Your feed has now been created and can be accessed through the 'Feed URL' displayed at the top of your feed's details.

You can replace the current default feed that is used for all media across the site with your new feed by selecting it under 'The site's main RSS feed uses' option, located at the bottom left of the 'Media XML' page. Once you click 'Save' to commit this change your new feed will be used as the podcast feed accessed from the Audio/Video page.

The new podcast feed will be accessible on the previous address of https://sitedomainname/Media/rss.xml so the address of any feeds previously published to iTunes won't need to be modified.

For information on how to submit your feed to itunes please see the article here.