Podcasting 106: Creating an RSS Feed

We have a volunteer to be the class podcasting example. Toby Palmer has done the narration of his children’s book Lilly and the Russet Gigantus, and wants to make a podcast of the narration.

So we will start by creating a category in the SMUG Podcast blog, which I have to do for him as an administrator. I can do this quickly and easily because Toby has used WordPress.com to host his blog.

Once I hit the Add User button, we see that Toby is now added as an Author on the SMUG Podcast Blog. He remains an Administrator on his own blog. By being part of the WordPress.com community, you can have some blogs on which you are the Administrator or an Editor, and you can be an Author or Contributor on others. This graphic shows Toby as an Author:

Now I need to create a category for Toby’s podcast:

When I click the Add New link, I can enter a new category for Toby:

When you create a category in a wordpress.com blog, you automatically create an RSS feed, because there is a feed for every category.

In this case the category for Toby’s podcasts is:

http://smugpodcasts.wordpress.com/category/lilly-and-the-russet-gigantus/

That’s not the RSS feed, though. That’s just the category URL, which show you all of the posts that are in that category. It’s REALLY complicated to get the RSS feed. See if you can tell the difference between the category URL and the RSS URL:

http://smugpodcasts.wordpress.com/category/lilly-and-the-russet-gigantus/feed

The first person who is able to spot the difference and put the correct answer in the comments below gets a 50 percent reduction in tuition to SMUG.

In Podcasting 107 I will take you step-by-step through creating a podcast post, and in Podcasting 109 we will improve your RSS feed using Feedburner.

Meanwhile, if you have any questions, just ask them in the comments.

Author: Lee Aase

Husband of one, father of six, grandfather of 15. Chancellor Emeritus, SMUG. Emeritus staff of Mayo Clinic. Founder of HELPcare and Administrator for HELPcare Clinic.

2 thoughts on “Podcasting 106: Creating an RSS Feed”

  1. In order to get my 50% off of tuition, I finally figured it out! After much detailed research, coffee, and investigation I concluded that the binary conversion of both urls state that the addition of “011001100110010101100101011001000000110100001010” = identifies the difference of the second url to include the word “feed”

    Thank you for the discount!

    – Jorge De La Garza
    SMUG Undergraduate

  2. Excellent work 😉

    Adding “feed” to the end of any category URL gives you the RSS feed for that category. It’s helpful for podcasting and for setting up blog category feeds.

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