Validating With iTunes

Assuming we haven't made any errors up until this point, we should try subscribing to our Podcast ourselves to see if what we've done so far works out.

To manually subscribe to your Podcast, open iTunes, select Advanced and then Subscribe to Podcast.... Enter your Podcast url, starting with http://.

Success!

Uh-oh!

If you see a list of your Episodes come up, then you have a valid feed and can stop here. If you don't see a list of episodes, then you should see a small, gray circle with an explamation point inside next to the URL you entered. Click it.

If a warning window pops up and says "There was a problem downloading http://...," then you have mis-typed the URL for your Podcast. You should proceed to Validating with Firefox below.

If a warning window pops up and says "http://... does not seem to be a valid Podcast URL,," then you have made a syntax error in your Podcast RSS Feed file. You should proceed to Validating with Feed Validator.

Validating With Firefox

Beside being a widely popular, free, and open-source alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox (available from getfirefox.com) has means to validate XML files including those used for Podcasting. It will also tell us if we have mis-typed our URL.

Open up Firefox and type in your Podcast URL.

• If you receive a "Page Not Found" error, you have mis-typed your URL. Go back to Uploading Your Feed and ensure you have named your file podcast.rss (and not, for example, podcast.rss.txt) and placed it in public_html. Remember also that if you are both a staff/faculty member and a student, your public_html folder will point to http://staff.washington.edu/YOURUWNETID/; if you are just a student, public_html will point to http://students.washington.edu/YOURUWNETID/; if you are just a staff member, public_html will point to http://staff.washington.edu/YOURUWNETID/.
• If you receive an error stating something along the lines of "XML Parsing Error...", you have made a syntax mistake in your Podcast's RSS file. Firefox should give you a line number on which the error can be found. The section after the next, entitled Common Mistakes contains some common mistakes that might be hard to spot.

Validating with Feed Validator

If you do not wish to download Mozilla Firefox or are unsure as to what your errors may be, you might try a free service called Feed Validator (available at FeedValidator.org, opens in a new window). Please note that the University of Washington is in no way affiliated with this website, and you should use it at your own risk and discretion.

Open the link above and enter your Podcast URL into the form. Before using this tool you should ensure your URL is valid by following the above instructions for Validating With Firefox. If you do not wish to download Firefox, Internet Explorer or any other modern browser will be able to tell you whether your URL is valid or not. Only Firefox and a select few other browsers, however, will be able to tell you whether you have made any glaring XML mistakes. And even Firefox's validation scheme is not perfect. Thus, we have FeedValidator.

The tool will return your RSS file to you with any errors highlighted. The following errors are okay and do not need to be changed:

• "width must be between 1 and 144" - this is an old standards specification. Your image may be of any size; up to 300px is recommended.
• "Undefined itunes_summary element: a" - this may come up one or more times if you have used any HTML in your summaries. HTML is unofficially supported and may be left in your summaries without gross defect to the feed.

Please note that if you see an error along the lines of "XML parsing error: <unknown>:Y:X: not well-formed (invalid token)," then you have likely made an error in the preceeding line and have forgotten something like a closing quote or an opening or closing greater-than or less-than sign.

Common Mistakes

Rarely will coding an RSS feed by hand result in an error-free file on one's first attempt. Below are some common and easy-to-make mistakes in XML/RSS files.

Improper Nesting

Remember that all tags opened within other tags must be closed within the other tags. For example, the following is invalid:

...while the following is valid:

Explicitly Closing or Not Implicitly Closing Non-Closed Tags

Remember tha the <enclosure /> tag has no associated closing </enclosure>. It simply does not exist and wouldn't make sense. Because XML says that every tag must be (explicitly or implicitly) closed, we must close the tag within the tag itself by putting inserting a / before the >.

For example, the following are invalid:

...while the following is valid:

Not putting spaces between tag attributes

Some tags such as the <enclosure> tag have one or more attributes rather than sub-tags. Such attributes and their associated values must be separated by spaces.

For example, the following is invalid:

...while the following is valid:

Improper Spelling and Capitalization

XML is very unforgiving in regards to both spelling and capitalization. For example, <pubDate> is not the same as <pubdate> and so on. Ensure that you have not mis-spelled or mis-capitalized any of your tags.

It is not at all uncommon to start from scratch and run these tests after every tag you add. This will greatly enhance your chances of spotting exactly where your error lies.

Now we will cover how to link to your Podcast from your web page using a variety of methods and free graphics.