Linking to your Podcast from your Webpage
Note: this post assumes you have a basic understanding of RSS. If you are unfamiliar with this acronym, please read this post (http://www.esddelu.org.uk/introducing/what-is-rss/) first. This post also assumes you know very basic HTML.
In order for your users to find your podcast you must, as with any online resource, provide a link to it.
Look here (http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/kermode) to see some examples of different types of links to a podcast. On the right-handside you will see several links including RSS, iTunes and Zune.
Open up the link and hover your cursor over (don’t click) the different hyperlinks to the podcast. On the bottom left of your browser you will see the actual link. You can see that the first part changes from itpc to http to zune and so on.
Try that out before continuing to read this post.
As you can see there are several ways of doing this. We will cover two of the most generic here. These are:
- Creating a special type of link which tells a computer to open iTunes and subscribe to the podcast
- Linking directly to the file and allowing your computer to decide what to do with the file.
There are advantages to both.
The first, the ITPC link, has an obvious appeal in that it is much easier for your end-user. They don’t need to do anything more than click on a link and follow the on-screen instructions. However some websites (for example, wordpress.com) will not allow the use of the ITPC link. Also not all of your users will use iTunes.
The second, the HTTP link, is a normal weblink and carries no information about what it is linking to. Each computer setup will do something different with it. Firefox, for example, will open the full RSS feed in a useful and accessible way. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, will display the actual code of the RSS in a manner completely bewildering to most users. However, the HTTP link, does allow your user to choose what they want to do with the link. They could, for example, copy and paste the link into iTunes to suscribe.
We would suggest including both on your website. Though please note that including all the options included in the example BBC page is very easy and you would go through exactly the same process; just changing the first section of the link. For example “itpc://mypodcast.qmul.ac.uk/rss.xml” would change to “zune://subscribe/Put in the title of your podcast here=http://mypodcast.qmul.ac.uk/rss.xml”.
How do you do it?
Well, it’s exactly the same as any hyperlink. You enter some text or an image and wrap some HTML code around it. In the example below I am going to borrow the link to Mark Kermode’s film reviews on the BBC website (always a good listen) and use that as an example.
The RSS file is located here http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/kermode/rss.xml.
You can see me making a copy of a normal http link and turning it into a itpc link in the video below.
The HTML code I used for the normal HTTP link to the RSS feed is:
{a href=”http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/kermode/rss.xml” }This is a link to my podcast.
The HTML code I used for the ITPC link to the RSS feed is:
{a href=”itpc://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/kermode/rss.xml”}This is a link to my podcast using ITPC.
Hopefully that covers what you need to know but, if not, you can as always get in touch with your questions.