Mevio Developer News

On DevCast-002, a chat with Lead developer on PodShow+ and PDN, Kevin Ostrowski.

XML-RPC for PHP version 2.0, final, is out.

The first DevCast is up. Adam and I chat about the early days of podcasting, this site (developer.podshow.com), the upcoming PodShow+ SDK, DGAP, and more. Check it out!

The DevCast is coming…

If you’re trying to get your head around microformats, this microformats primer from Digital Web Magazine is a decent place to start. The philosophy-to-applicability ratio is still pretty high but it’s among the better of articles I’ve come across. If I understand it correctly, the idea can be boiled down thusly: microformats are a way to communicate structured data through Web pages and other vehicles that were traditionally used to translate display-oriented markup.

The IE7 Feeds API has been out for a while now. Has anyone built a podcast aggregator with it yet?

Over the weekend and past couple of days I’ve been working on a demo, so no podplay feeds yet. In the meantime, a few of you have sent mails about the listener services Adam mentioned in Thursday’s DSC. Good news, these will emit RSS and OPML, so as long as your podcatcher supports import/export, you shouldn’t need to do any additional coding. One of you suggested supporting an enhancement to the combined RSS feeds that mix several different podcasts into one.

I’d like tags available for each so the softtware can determine which feed they originally came from, to treat them differently if the user so selects, or even perhaps split them back up into the original “feeds”, if thats what the user wants.

Excellent idea! I think we can solve this one with the RSS source sub-element of item. I’ve fed this back to the dev team, stay tuned. It looks like I wrote support into GigaDial for this. Take a look at the New England Podcasters’ feed to see ’source’ in action.

I’ve added a technorati link to this weblog’s sidebar to make it easy to see who is linking here. I’ll be checking it regularly so if you want to comment via your weblog I’ll see it.

Chris Rockwell and I reviewed a dev version of our podplay feeds today and had a great discussion about the right structure for the data. A key insight, one that took me a while to get, is that the podplays themselves are the fundamental items of interest: “C.C. Chapman’s U-Turn Cafe played Josephine by Darren Geffre on Show #7″. We’ll be using that as an organizing principle for our RSS, coming soon.

Yesterday I read up on various namespace extensions and came up with little. XSPF was closest but it was designed for a different use case (listening as opposed to reporting). MusicBrainz tags are intriguing and I think ultimately there will be a place for them, but not yet.

I’m continuing to dig, checking out these directories of RSS namespaces, found with this Google search. Also suggested: MusicBrainz metadata, XSPF (thanks, Lucas!).