Bootstrap Podcasting

After listening to some of the other podcasts that are out there, I decided that the time has come for me to give it a try.

I recently downloaded Audacity, which offers voice-activated recording features and accepts the line-in that is currently carrying the mic from an old over-the-ear gaming headset I had sitting around. I have to increase the Gain quite a bit to hear myself after recording through such a low-end mic, but it gets the job done.

In order to run a podcast, however, you need more than just a few mp3's.

In about two hours, I worked out a way to run podcasts from Xaraya using only Xarpages, a new articles pubtype and a couple of templates. Continue reading to see the actual templates and get started setting up your own podcast using Xaraya!

Before loading anything else, you need to establish a page template in your theme that will use RSS/XML format instead of HTML/XHTML. It needs to point at the iTunes XML namespace and then just loads the rest of the page inside.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <!DOCTYPE blocklayout PUBLIC "-//XAR//DTD BL 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://xaraya.com/bl1/DTD/bl1-strict.dtd"> <?xar type="page" ?> <xar:blocklayout version="1.0" content="text/xml" xmlns:xar="http://xaraya.com/2004/blocklayout"> <rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0"> <xar:module class="modulespace" main="true" /> </rss> </xar:blocklayout>

With this in place, we can move on to our Xarpages component. I created a new Xarpage type for "podcasts" and gave it the following template as default (eg: [theme]/modules/xarpages/page-podcast.xt).

<channel> <title>#$current_page.dd.podcast_title#</title> <description>#$current_page.dd.podcast_description#</description> <link>#xarVarPrepForDisplay(xarServerGetBaseURL())#</link> <language>en-us</language> <copyright>#$current_page.dd.copyright#</copyright> <docs>http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss</docs> <webMaster>#$current_page.dd.webmaster#</webMaster> <xar:if condition="isset($current_page.dd.author)"> <itunes:author>#$current_page.dd.author#</itunes:author> </xar:if> <xar:if condition="isset($current_page.dd.subtitle)"> <itunes:subtitle>#$current_page.dd.subtitle#</itunes:subtitle> </xar:if> <xar:if condition="isset($current_page.dd.podcast_description)"> <itunes:summary>#$current_page.dd.podcast_description#</itunes:summary> </xar:if> <itunes:owner> <itunes:name>St.Ego</itunes:name> <itunes:email>#$current_page.dd.webmaster#</itunes:email> </itunes:owner> <itunes:explicit>No</itunes:explicit> <xar:if condition="isset($current_page.dd.banner_image) and !empty($current_page.dd.banner_image)"> <itunes:image href="http://www.ivory-tower.net/var/uploads/#$current_page.dd.banner_image#" mce_href="var/uploads/#$current_page.dd.banner_image#"/> </xar:if> <xar:blockgroup name="podcast" id="podcast" /> </channel>

This template displays the podcast meta data as pulled from individual Xarpages of type "podcast". It has a few interesting tweaks in place to handle file size determination, etc, but I won't go into that here.

At the end of the template you can see where all of the remaining data is piped in from Blocks. So, we create a new "podcast" blockgroup and create a "topitems" article block to put in it. The "topitems" block is then directed to use the following template for "[theme]/modules/articles/blocks/topitems-podcast.xt".

<xar:set name="pubdate">xarLocaleFormatUTCDate("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z", $items[0]['pubdate'])</xar:set> <lastBuildDate>#$pubdate#</lastBuildDate> <pubDate>#$pubdate#</pubDate> <itunes:category text="Technology"> <itunes:category text="Podcasting"/> </itunes:category> <xar:if condition="!empty($items)"> <xar:foreach in="$items" value="$item"> <xar:set name="article">xarModAPIFunc('articles','user','get',array('aid'=>$item['aid'],'extra'=>array('dynamicdata')))</xar:set> <xar:set name="podcasturl">""</xar:set> <xar:set name="summary">$article['summary']</xar:set> <xar:if condition="empty($summary)"> <xar:elseif condition="xarModIsHooked('uploads','articles',21) and substr($summary,0,1) eq ';'" /> <xar:set name="notes_output">xarModAPIFunc('uploads','user','showoutput',array('value' => $summary, 'multiple' => true))</xar:set> <xar:foreach in="$notes_output" key="$fileid" value="$fileinfo"> <xar:set name="podcasturl">$fileinfo['fileLocation']</xar:set> </xar:foreach> <xar:elseif condition="file_exists('var/uploads/'.$summary)" /> <xar:set name="podcasturl">"var/uploads/".$summary</xar:set> <xar:else /> <xar:set name="podcasturl">$summary</xar:set> </xar:if> <xar:set name="baseurl">xarServerGetBaseURL()</xar:set> <xar:set name="baseurl_len">strlen($baseurl)</xar:set> <xar:set name="relative_url">$podcasturl</xar:set> <xar:if condition="stristr($podcasturl, $baseurl)"> <xar:set name="relative_url">substr($podcasturl, $baseurl_len)</xar:set> </xar:if> <xar:if condition="substr($relative_url, 0, 1) eq '?'"> <xar:set name="relative_url">"index.php".$relative_url</xar:set> </xar:if> <xar:set name="podcasturl">$baseurl.$relative_url</xar:set> <xar:set name="podcasturl">str_replace("&amp;","&",$podcasturl)</xar:set> <xar:set name="filesize">"0"</xar:set> <xar:if condition="file_exists($relative_url)"> <xar:set name="foo">clearstatcache()</xar:set> <xar:set name="filesize">filesize($relative_url)</xar:set> </xar:if> <xar:set name="pubdate">xarLocaleFormatDate("%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z", $item['pubdate'])</xar:set> <xar:set name="keywords">xarModAPIFunc('keywords','user','getwords',array('modid'=>151,'itemtype'=>21,'itemid'=>$item['aid']))</xar:set> <xar:set name="keywordlist">implode(",", $keywords)</xar:set> <item> <title>#$item.title#</title> <link>#xarModURL('articles','user','display',array('aid' => $item.aid))#</link> <guid>#$podcasturl#</guid> <description>#$article.body#</description> <enclosure url="#$podcasturl#" length="#$filesize#" type="audio/mpeg"/> <category>Podcasts</category> <pubDate>#$pubdate#</pubDate> <itunes:author>#xarUserGetVar('uname', $item.authorid)#</itunes:author> <itunes:explicit>No</itunes:explicit> <itunes:subtitle>#$article.notes#</itunes:subtitle> <itunes:summary>#$article.body#</itunes:summary> <xar:if condition="isset($article['duration'])"> <itunes:duration>#$article.duration#</itunes:duration> </xar:if> <itunes:keywords>#$keywordlist#</itunes:keywords> </item> </xar:foreach> </xar:if>

I took some extra effort to ensure that keywords were included, as well as file size calcs. Once completed, you just point iTunes at the URL for your new podcast Xarpage and publish mp3's to that articles pubtype!

From here, it is only a matter of producing the audio recordings and splicing them together for a complete podcast solution. Look forward to seeing (hearing?) St.Ego's Ivory Tower Podcast in the days ahead!