Going Election-Free Today / Blogware, Attachments, Enclosures, Podcasting and Duran Duran Spinoff Bands

“No, please, no more election blogging!”

That’s right, aside from this very entry, The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st

Century shall refrain from commenting on the U.S. Election

today. Not because I’m not interested — I am, after all, the

direct descendant of an American, have blond-haired blue-eyed

cousins in Dayton, Ohio and am marrying a fine lady who

knocked

me out with her American thighs — but because just about

every other blog written in

English

(and no doubt several other languages) will be going on about it. If

you need a break from the ranting, punditry and bile, come

here!

Okay, I couldn’t resist posting this one.

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You may have noted that I said that “aside from this very entry” in

the

paragraph above. That’s because I’m going to share a file with you

that’s tangentially related to the election:

the song Election Day by the Duran Duran spinoff band Arcadia. It’s included as an attachment to this blog entry.

(To see the attachment, click on the permalink for this entry, then scroll to the bottom of the article. Click on the attachment to download it.)

Attachments? What are attachments?

In Blogware, an attachment is

a file that is attached to a blog entry, whether it’s an article, photo

or music/movie/book review. Think of it as being similar to an email

attachment.

You might ask why we included attachments in Blogware. After all, blogs

— being web pages — have always provided a way to include files in

entries. You simply upload the file to a space accessible on the web

and link to it. Every Blogware blog includes a filesystem so that you

can do just that.

The difference between attachments and uploaded-and-linked files lies

in the name: attachments. A file that has been uploaded is independent

of the blog entry; an attachment is part of the blog entry. With an

uploaded-and-linked file, if you delete the blog entry, the file

remains. With an attachment, if you delete the blog entry, the attached

file vanishes too.

If you want me to skip the technical stuff and get to the point right now…

…then I’ll say it plainly and simply:

Blogware supports podcasting!

If you want to start podcasting on your blog, record your audio entry

(MP3 is probably the best format) and include the file as an attachment

to your blog entry. That’s it.

If you want a more technical explanation, keep reading.

Enclosures

A blog that uses RSS 2.0 as its method of syndication (you might want to look at Mezzoblue’s or BBC News’

explanations of syndication) can include files in its feeds as

enclosures. In the RSS 2.0 feed of a Blogware blog, any attachments are

included as enclosures,

which is RSS 2.0’s way of saying “hey, there’s other content attached

to this entry”. If this entry’s still on the main page of the blog,

you’ll see this article in the RSS feed. Inside the <item>

element for this article, you’ll see the <enclosure> element for Election Day:

<enclosure url="http://accordionguy.blogware.com/_attachments/173328/Arcadia

- Election Day.mp3" length="4250226"

type="audio/mpeg" />

The <enclosure> element has three attributes, which provide some information about the attachment:

1. url: This specifies the location where the attached file can be found.
2. length: This specifies the size of the attached file in bytes.
3. type: This is the MIME (Multipart Internet Mail Extensions) type of the file. An MP3 file has the MIME type of “audio/mpeg”.

This information allows any software that reads the RSS feed to

find the attached file as well as “know” what kind of file it is and

how large it is.

You may have noted that a blog entry that includes a file as an

enclosure provides more information about the file than a blog entry

that merely links to the file.

For more on RSS 2.0 enclosures, check out Dave Winer’s article on the subject.

Although I said it before in a slightly different way, let me say it again:

Blogware supports enclosures!

Podcasting

The term “podcasting” is a pun made by mixing the words “iPod” and

“broadcasting”. I’ll quote iPodder.org’s explanation of the term:

The term is a little misleading. Many people, quite naturally, 

infer that podcasting works only for iPods. This is not the case:

podcasting is blogging using audio files as enclosures rather than text

on a web page.

Why not simply link to an audio file instead of including it as an attachment/enclosure?

There’s a subtle difference: a link to an audio file merely provides

its location; an audio file included as an enclosure provides extra

information about the file and also implies that it is part of the

entry.

The extra information provided by an enclosure allows RSS-reading

software to make decisions about downloading the file referenced by the

enclosure. For example, a piece of software that downloads attached

audio files for later playback can be set so that it downloads only

audio files (it checks the type attribute to do this) over a specified size (it checks the size attribute to do this) late at night when the computer is not in use. iPodder is an example of this sort of software — it downloads audio blog entries for later playback.

Got questions? Ask away in the comments.