March 08, 2005
New Podcasting Theme for the Browser-Friendly Service
To accomodate the increasing number of podcasters using FeedBurner, you can now select the "PodcastFriendly" theme found in our Browser-Friendly service. By doing so, whenever somebody clicks on your feed link in a browser, they will get a page formatted to look like this example...
(click image to zoom)
...instead of a bunch of XML source code that isn't very helpful. The PodcastFriendly theme has several benefits: it contains links to a variety of podcasting clients that can be downloaded for use with your podcast, it provides you with a space to give a brief overview of the podcast, and it makes for a much more subscriber-friendly introduction to podcasts (including links to podcasting definitions and history) than a screenful of XML code can provide.
Comments
That's a very nice theme. Maybe it's asking too much, but I would like a combined podcast and rss theme so people could get info on subscribing to either.
This seems counter-intuitive to helping people subscribe. The other Browser-Friendly view is great. It just tells you how to subscribe and puts the actual entries out of the way. I couldn't even care if they were there. I just want to help users subscribe. If you click on an RSS link and get that page, the user will likely not subscribe. MHO.
Randy,
It's funny, the feedback we've gotten either perfectly reflects your view or is just the opposite (e.g., "I like the new look, but where are my feed items? Why are they below the fold?"). With this new podcasting theme we felt that providing links to the downloadable content (the speaker icons) might be useful for potential listeners who'd wish to preview the podcasts before adding them to their podcast client, so items take more prominence. Also, standards for adding podcast feeds to podcast clients still seem more frontier-days than 'regular' RSS readers, so we were hoping to provide links to the best-known clients at this point and let the dust settle a bit before committing to a subscription scheme.
I'm sure we'll start to see more 'merged' clients like FeedDemon, where hybrid podcast/text feeds can be experienced in a single application. Still, yours is a point well-taken and we'll weigh all the feedback before our next iteration. We do hope to offer some publisher-customizable options for Browser-Friendly in the future, so some of the power will be (rightfully) out of our hands if our users want to put their own design skills to work!
what will you think of next? thank you, feedburner, for making podcasting possible for someone with no technological know-how and a face made for radio.
Hey guys,
Love the new podcast themed browser friendly page. One thing, when you change the title of ones feed and update the feed, the title change does not show in the browser friendly podcast theme.
If by "title" you mean the title you provide to label your feed within your FeedBurner account, you should know that the title actually used for display on the theme is the value found in your feed's element. FeedBurner does not modify this element's value; it usually is set in your source feed to be the same as your Blog title (or whatever value you might have set it to, depending on your publishing application).
Nice look on the podcaster theme. Is it ok if we hack it up for personal use? Thought I'd ask before taking the liberty of making changes.
Do you think you will have it working in Safari at any point?
Great Stuff by the way and many thanks
ted thrasher
I don't understand. If you have a "smartcasting" feed then you cannot have the browserfriendly service. So, should podcasters switch to browserfriendly feeds? Don't you need RSS 2.0 to have podcast to work well on a feed?
I'm confused.
thanks,l.
You certainly can have a feed that has both SmartCast and Browser-Friendly applied; these services do not conflict in any way. (We expect there are a number of feeds that have both SmartCast and the "Podcast-Friendly" theme found in Browser-Friendly applied.) SmartCast will convert any feed that is not currently RSS 2.0 into RSS 2.0. Browser-Friendly then applies an XSLT/CSS style transformation to that feed to create the visual treatment. (The actual underlying feed XML format is unaffected by Browser-Friendly).
Ted --
We should have Browser-Friendly working with Safari as soon as Apple releases their next update to OS X -- Tiger. The Tiger version of Safari is supposed to support XSLT, the XML transformation and display language underlying Browser-Friendly's capabilities. Current releases of Safari do not support XSLT.
Joe Cool --
We're thinking about offering a self-style version of Browser-Friendly in the near future. This theme would allow users to specify their own style sheet and XSLT instructions for complete customization of the outcome. At this time you can't directly alter the styling of the version FeedBurner publishes (but you could of course write your own XSLT and CSS instructions and then apply them to a feed that you publish on your site.)
