“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.
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:
- url: This specifies the location where the attached file can be found.
- length: This specifies the size of the attached file in bytes.
- 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:
Think how a desktop aggregator works. You subscribe to a set of feeds,
and then can easily view the new stuff from all of the feeds together,
or each feed separately.
Podcasting works the same way, with one exception. Instead of reading the new content on a computer screen, you listen to the new content on an iPod or iPod-like device.
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.
