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5 Case Study 1 - Leicester Research Archive - University of Leicester

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How easy is it to create RSS feeds?<br />

Toby Travis (V&A): I have done RSS feeds for other projects, so when I started<br />

podcasting, I already knew how to hand code RSS feeds. But because its so easy<br />

to make mistakes, I have just bought some s<strong>of</strong>tware. You also have to validate<br />

the feed. You can do that on www.feedvalidator.org. I used that when I was hand<br />

coding it. Now I am using this s<strong>of</strong>tware called feeder (for Mac), but I think it is<br />

still good to check the feed in the feedvalidator. The feeder simplifies the<br />

process, the other thing it does it adds the iTunes tags. iTunes requires a whole<br />

set <strong>of</strong> tags, which makes it writing it by hand really cumbersome. If you have<br />

never done HTML or XML hand coding is probably very difficult and such a<br />

s<strong>of</strong>tware is very helpful. I think without such s<strong>of</strong>tware, it would be quite<br />

daunting if you have no experience.<br />

You were the first museum in the UK which <strong>of</strong>fered a podcast, weren’t you?<br />

Dave Anderson (Towneley Hall): Yes. To start the ball rolling, we released a<br />

prototype audio tour in December 2005. We hand-coded the RSS feed, so this<br />

was mainly a way to get my head around how to programme everything. I ripped<br />

the content <strong>of</strong> our audio guide from a CD and turned it into an mp3 file. We did<br />

this first episode mainly to familiarise ourselves with the process <strong>of</strong> producing a<br />

podcast. Then we got a grant for an exhibition and in January 2006 we started<br />

recording the first sort <strong>of</strong> real podcast.<br />

What was the key thing you learned from the first test podcast?<br />

Dave Anderson (Towneley Hall): There was a lot <strong>of</strong> trial and error involved in<br />

trying to set up the RSS feed. The actual production <strong>of</strong> the audio was the easiest<br />

part <strong>of</strong> it, really. The challenge was to categorise it correctly, so that iTunes can<br />

pick it up.<br />

Why are you doing one episode with and one without images?<br />

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