I thought the "S" in RSS was "Simple"

Hardware and technical stuff
1

There’s a few videocasts I like that are in HD. Since the standard Itunes version isn’t in HD, I had to add the feeds manually. No big deal, I thought.

I use three RSS feed aggregators: Bloglines, Newsfire, and itunes. I add in the feed to Geekbrief ( to Bloglines and it aggregates properly. Newsfire and itunes both throw up at the link.

I got Newsfire as part of the Macheist bundle last December and one item I liked about it was it’d download the videos automatically. Since I’d have it open most of the day, it’d save me from having to open up Itunes to grab them.

So, I guess my question is: why did only one of the 3 readers get the feed right? Is bloglines like the Internet Explorer of RSS readers, and doesn’t give a shit what feeds it? The irony to the whole thing is, the link I was using was the “subscribe via iTunes” link.

2

Can you linke me to the RSS feed in question?

Bloglines directly supports many versions of RSS, iTunes often requires some tags in the RSS code that’s specific to iTunes, and that can cause some problems, and Newsfire doesn’t even mention what RSS type it supports in the release notes, so I’m not sure about that one. Anyway, any of these can cause some problems with certain feeds.

3

Bah, I thought I put it in the post. I fail the Internet

http://www.podshow.com/feeds/hd.xml

4

Well, it works for me fine in iTunes. Try it again? Maybe it’s been updated since you first tried. I was able to get the video list and download them as I wanted.

After looking at the feed I’m sure it isn’t Newsfire’s fault. The file is full of itunes tags, which are extra XML tags that itunes requireds for its RSS feeds 'cause apparently they’re a bunch of draconian jerks or something. Newsfire is probably just designed to work with the RSS standard, as everything should be, and didn’t like the itunes tags, whereas Bloglines is - according to their FAQ - designed to work with as many popular formats as possible, and this probably includes itunes.

5

It’s working now in both NewsFire and iTunes, so, yeah, it must have just been something wonky.

Thanks.