Podcatchers that support ATOM 1.0?
Written on July 4, 2006 by Conor O'Neill
I recently passed comment that the Juice podcast receiver could not see the MP3’s embedded in Tantek’s feed. I assumed wrongly that there was something wrong with the feed. But he pointed out that Juice must not support ATOM 1.0 yet. From what I can see, development on Juice has stalled which is a pity as it is a fine tool.
Tantek says that iTunes 6.0 does support ATOM 1.0 but that is no good to me as I refuse to install software which is built on the basis of controlling users. However I have had no success finding an alternative. I looked at both JPodder and Doppler but they rejected the feed too. Only Armangil’s podcatcher seems to support it but that is a CLI tool which just sounds like too much hard work.
Does anyone know of a Windows podcatcher which does support ATOM 1.0 along with the usual RSS? Need the standard unsupervised downloads etc as features.
UPDATE 1: I’ve also looked at standard feedreaders like Blogbridge and Awasu. Neither of them can even parse Tantek’s feed. The feed gives some errors in the feed validator but only trivial ones so the problem looks to be at the reader end. Awasu is a nice looking piece of software and does have auto-download of enclosures which is all I really need.
UPDATE 2: I needed to upgrade Awasu to the latest beta for ATOM 1.0 support. It can now see Tantek’s and Tim Bray’s feeds perfectly. In fact, it now proves that Bloglines is making a complete mess of displaying Tantek’s. Next to see if the enclosures are downloaded ok.
Technorati Tags: ATOM, RSS, podcatcher, podcast, Juice, iPodder, iTunes, Armangil, Blogbridge, Awasu
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G’day
Yes, Awasu has supported Atom 1.0 for a while although it’s still only in the beta version, not the full general release.
I had a quick look through your blog and I get the feeling you’ll definitely want to have a play with the latest alpha release. It has support for microformats
http://www.awasu.com/weblog/?p=324
No way! Seriously excellent. I’m downloading now. So far I’ve been very impressed by the current beta. I had honestly never heard of Awasu until you posted on Scoble’s and DeWitt Clinton’s blogs re ATOM vs RSS.
Two questions - how do I mark all posts in a feed Unread? I can only get it to mark all as Read. Also, how do I force enclosure download? Or is that not a feature on the personal edition?
So the "G’Day" hints that my assumption that you are a Japanese company is a bit wide of the mark?
>>> Two questions - how do I mark all posts in a feed Unread?
If you right-click on a read item, the context menu will show menu items for marking as unread, and vice versa.
>>> Also, how do I force enclosure download? Or is that not a feature on the personal edition?
Enclosures need to be turned on globally (in the Enclosures tab of the Program Options dialog) and also for each individual channel (top-right of the Channel page in the Channel Properties dialog). Awasu will only download enclosures for new feed items received so if you turn these on for an existing channel, it won’t go back and download enclosures attached to feed items you’ve already received.
A feature comparison grid is here:
http://www.awasu.com/comparison.php
>>> So the "G’Day" hints that my assumption that you are a Japanese company is a bit wide of the mark?
Yes and no. I’m Japanese but we’re an Australian company (and I’ve lived there for ages):
http://www.awasu.com/weblog/?p=320
ah understood. Playing more now with it.
OK, so MP3 enclosure download worked perfectly for Tantek’s ATOM 1.0 feed. Nice!
But I’m not having much joy with the microformat detection on this site. The d.Construct post is a hCalendar entry created using the Structured Blogging plug-in and Tails detects it ok but the Alpha of Awasu does not. Have I done something wrong or is it just an Alpha issue?
I think this is a fantastic feature to have and a real differentiator over all other feedreaders. You should be shouting about this from the rooftops. Once I get it working, I certainly will be.
>>> Have I done something wrong or is it just an Alpha issue?
Um, your feed is RSS and the hCalendar stuff is in a element, *as CDATA*! This is exactly the problem DeWitt was talking about - because your content is being published as a blob of text rather than real XML, Awasu can’t get at the hCalendar metadata. It runs the XPath on the feed XML itself, not what it’s got left after it parses it as RSS/Atom, so if your metadata is CDATA, there’s no way XPath is going to be able to retreive it.
Things are never easy…
Ahh, it’s all Feedburners fault
Or actually the Feedburner plug-in for Wordpress which redirects all the feeds over to Feedburner. I thought it would use ATOM when the URL said atom but actually it always uses the default which was RSS.
So I’ve re-configed Feedburner to deliver ATOM by default and the microformat data looks fine now.
I unsubscribed and resubscribed to my ATOM feed in Awasu but it seems to have totally broken the metadata parsing now, not even comments are being identified. I’ll do more snooping.
I’ve had a bit of a play with your feed and managed to get Awasu to recognize the hCalendar event.
If you take a copy of your feed XML and save it to a local file, you can tweak it and then subscribe to it locally. You’ll need to remove the CDATA markers from the item description and fix up the minor XML errors.
There is also a minor problem in the XPath query Awasu is using to locate the metadata. It is looking for an XML tag with an attribute of "vevent" but your feed has "vevent x-wpsb-simple-event". Either tweak the XPath query in Awasu’s Resources/Metadata Modules/hCalendar.mm file or tweak the attribute in the feed XML. I’ll fix this up for the next release.
Excellent. I spotted that x-wpsb-simple-event text too and thought it might be an issue. The Structured Blogging plug-in adds it. This is a really great fetaure set you are building.
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