Podcasts Feeds Supported
After getting standard text based feeds functional, the next steps was to get other feeds types supported. As feeds are generated/written in XML this means that the tags used in the markup language are not restricted liked HTML and users can create their own tags such as:
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<icon>http://www.domain.com/icon.gif</icon>
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<content_descriptor>User Content</content_descriptor>
This could have been used to detect/or describe which kind of feed the user was adding/viewing (e.g. text based, podcast, image feeds). But due to the nature of XML there is no standardised way of describing if the feed they have added, is entirely image based or contains some kind of video/audio information.
This means that I will have to let the user choose what type of feed they are trying to add.
When developing the Podcast module I encountered a wide verity of problems, as the XML based feed for a Podcast is not widely standardised. Apple has made an attempt at trying to solve this problem, as their media player "iTunes" supports Podcasts, but will only accept XML that has been written to conform to their technical specifications. After adding wide verity of feeds I found that some podcasts didn't include the <description> which caused the layout of the site to break. Also some Podcasts would link the user to a web page instead of linking them directly to the MP3 audio file or video file. These things all had to be taken into account while debugging the code.