This is Part Eight The Magic of The Enclosure sub-element Within Item a continuation from my articles on RSS - All available at Ezine Articles (ezinearticles.com)

• Part One - "RSS Mania Addiction - An Introduction to RSS and the Terminology"

• Part Two - Outline of How to Create an RSS Feed"

• Part Three - The Template File"

• Part Four - The Basic Elements of the Channel Element"

• Part Five - How The RSS Feed Works & Some Programming Constructs"

• Part Six - RSS Channel Sub-Elements Specifically Image & How To Use It"

• Part Seven - Understanding RSS - Part Seven - The Elements Within the "Item" Element

Now it is time for Magic. Ever hear the term "PodCasting?" Well it originally came from the Apple IPod and that little device that has swept the world allowing everyone to hook into their favorite music (and now video etc.) The RSS specifications grew with the world around it and therefore the little XML "enclosure" command came to be found within the files.

What does this mean? Well at first RSS was limited to the text format. What RSS first generation files were doing were spreading the news of the world in small little text headline files. Of course the human desire for ever more and more is impossible to stop. What if we wanted to send picture? Well there is the [!Cdata command which we will discuss in the next article. But what if I wanted to send some type of information that was not text? That is where the enclosure does its magic.

Within enclosure I can actually place any audio, mpg, jpeg..whatever into that little element. And what this means to the aggregator is, "Hey, my RSS file also has a few small additions that come with it. Grab those as well." And as part of this element the RSS file also says, "Hey, this is the format and this is the size of the file. Because I am being courteous and nice, and I want you the aggregator to know just how much you have to grab."

For those quick thinkers out there, what one can actually do in an RSS file is this. Take Janis Joplin and her album "Ball & Chain". Well we would create an item for each of the songs, (I will show you how to do this in another article), describe each one of them in the "description" element and put an mp3 of the song defined in the item in the enclosure command. And then anyone who wanted to get my RSS feed on Janis would be able to read a description of the songs and listen to them.

Or say I wanted to release a few short-shorts on Shakespeare's Sonnets. I would read them, record them, and then put the text of each into the description and my mp3 recording into the enclosure. Voila! An RSS on Shakespeare.

One critical caveat. Remember these are not text files and therefore they can get large. The larger they are the more the aggregator has to grab, the more bandwidth etc. Remember that when you release your songs on the Net in an RSS file for those IPod-ers out there!

Just to remind you. The enclosure command consists of three parts:

1. url - The URL of the actual enclosure.
2. length - The size in bytes and not an estimate but a total size
3. type - A standard MIME type, e.g. Audio, Video, Text etc. A list and explanation of standard MIME types can be found here - http://www.fileformat.info/info/mimetype/standard.htm

<Item>

<title>Summertime by Janis Joplin</title>

<link>http://www.janisjoplin.com/songs/summertime.html</link>

<description> Summertime, And the livin' is easy Fish are jumpin' And the cotton is high Your daddy's rich And your mamma's good lookin' So hush little baby Don't you cry One of these mornings You're going to rise up singing Then you'll spread your wings And you'll take to the sky But till that morning There's a'nothing can harm you With daddy and mamma standing by Summertime, And the livin' is easy Fish are jumpin' And the cotton is high Your daddy's rich And your mamma's good lookin' So hush little baby Don't you cry</description>

<author>George Gershwin sung by Janis Joplin</author>

<category>Blues</category>

<category>Jazz</category>

<comments>http://www.janisjoplin.com/comments/summertime.html</comments>

<enclosure url="http://www.janisjoplin.com/mp3s/summertime.mp3" length="4368242" type="audio/mpeg"/>

<pubDate>Sat, 10 Dec 2005 23:00:00 GMT</pubDate>

</Item>

There you have it. An RSS PodCast. One item of the song Summertime. Of course your RSS will have every song on the album. Anyone who applies to the feed will be able to listen to all of Janis's songs in their RSS feed - Their Podcast. And you can do the same with a video, pictures etc. For all the "current" terminology take a look at Wikipedia.

There you go your Podcast. Next article we will attack the controversial [!Cdata command structure. After that you will have a complete well formed XML - RSS file.

Copyright 2005 Ted W. Gross. All rights reserved. (You may publish this article in its entirety with the following author's information with live links only.)

Ted Gross

Ted Gross was born and raised in New York City and in 1978, moved to Israel, and currently resides in Jerusalem.

He began his writing career in University as the op-ed editor of the University paper and wrote a series of eight editorials during that year. While in Israel, he wrote two children's books. "The Letter & The Crown"; was published in Israel, while the second, and more successful, was published in the United States by United Synagogue entitled, "Of Rabbit's Wool & Camel's Hair". While teaching comparative religion, he also had articles on polemics and religion published in Midstream Magazine.

However, by the time the children's books were published his family was growing, and he began work and was active in high tech from 1985 until 2001. There he functioned as a CTO ? Chief Technological Officer ? in three different companies, managing to take two companies from start-up phase to a buyout and a successful IPO respectively.

After having taken the last company to a successful IPO, six children and a peaceful divorce, it was time to leave high-tech and try and develop some ideas in writing. At that point, Israel embarked on "Operation Defensive Shield", and since Ted is a reserve battlefield medic, he ended up in Jenin, and the battles that took place there became front-page news all over the world. "Three Weeks In Jenin" was written soon after, though unfortunately the contract was cancelled once the United States entered into its current war with Iraq. However, an independent movie producer, did do a documentary on Ted's experiences as a medic in Jenin.

He currently is working on the "Chronicles of the Children of Heaven" (a fantasy work), on another non-fiction book entitled "Last Times" and on a cooking book entitled "Help! I Have A Fire In My Kitchen", (as well as short stories and poetry from time to time). To make ends meet, Ted owns a real-estate investment firm in Jerusalem and Virgin Earth Article Submissions.

Examples of Ted's work can be found on his web site.

Usually one can find Ted either putting out fires in his kitchen, drinking coffee in a cafe musing about the great "what-ifs" of life, assistant coaching little league baseball, dealing with one of his six children, having a fight with his sister, or walking the byways of Jerusalem with Rainbow, his golden retriever, pondering the silence of the heavens.