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In a previous tutorial episode, "Tutorial 5 - Importing items from multiple other feeds into your feed", we imported items from 2 feeds into our feed. When importing items in chunks like we did, it is likely that the items won't be in order with the newest at the top. The items in the feed can be rearranged easily by using FeedForAll Mac's sorting capability.

Before we start with sorting, we will import the most recent items from the two feeds we had previously used. Using the "Open Recent" toolbar item import all the newer items.

In the "Item" menu at the bottom is "Sort". The sort capability of FeedForAll Mac will allow all the items in a feed to be sorted by almost any of the RSS 2.0 item fields and fields of any of the fully supported XML namespaces. The fields can be sorted as alphabetic strings, dates or numbers.

We could sort based on the item's title. To do this select, "Sort" from the "Item" menu. Select "title" for Sort On. By default "title" has an "Alphabetic" Field Type. And the default Direction for the sort is "Ascending". Clicking on "Sort" will cause all the items to be sorted into alphabetic order.

While this makes it easy to find an item you know the title of, it is not very useful for a real feed. Since most feeds are published with the most recent items at the top. Before we sort by pubDate we will undo the sort based on title. Select "Undo Sort on <title>" from the "Edit" menu.

From the "Item" menu select "Sort", again. This time choose "pubDate" from the Sort On field. Since we want the newest date first choose "Descending" for the Direction and click on "Sort". Now the feed is sorted by pubDate.

Now the next time items are imported from the two other feeds, use the sort capability to keep the new feed in proper order.

For more information and other tutorials check that help system the comes with FeedForAll Mac or the FeedForAll web site at http://www.FeedForAll.com/.

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In the previous tutorial I showed you how you can import items from multiple feeds into one feed. In this tutorial I will use the import feature to import items from a master feed into a feed that only has some of the items.

I have a feed with family news. It contains my most recent recipes, the latest news about the kids and what the pets have been up to recently. On my webpage with the pets pictures I want to have a feed with only the news about them.

I could maintain a separate feed about the pets. I could also create the feed for the pets and use import, like in the last tutorial, to add those items in to the main feed. But I will show you how you can use import to copy items from a master feed into separate feeds that contain only a portion of the items.

My master feed is “SecondImportTutorialFeed.xml”, and it has all of my current articles. I have created “A_feed_blog_about_my_pets.xml” as the feed I want to add my pet related items to.

First I must open “A_feed_blog_about_my_pets.xml”, since that is where I want to import the items into. Next, from the “Item” menu select “Import Items”.

On the “Import Items” window click on “Open”, since we will be opening a file on our computer instead of downloading from the internet. Select the “SecondImportTutorialFeed.xml” file.

Select the 4 stories related to the pets and click “Import”. Now those four items are in my feed about pets.

I will also quickly create a feed for just news about the kids. I will quickly fill in a title, description and link. Then, again, select “Import Items” from the “Item” menu. Open the “SecondImportTutorialFeed.xml” feed. Next import the two items about the kids and you are done.

For more information and other tutorials check the help system the comes with FeedForAll Mac or the FeedForAll web site at http://www.FeedForAll.com/.

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If you are creating a feed with items from other feeds you have a couple of choices as how you do this. The first is copy from one feed to the other, but this is both awkward, time consuming and prone to error. The preferred way is to use the "Import Items" feature in FeedForAll Mac.

I have a feed which I have been importing items from two other feeds, with permissions from the owners to redistribute. These two feeds are http://www.feedforall.com/blog-feed.xml and http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/blog-feed.xml. The last time any items were imported was on 9/20/06, five days before today.

The importance of this will now be shown. From the "Item" menu select "Import Items". This will open the "Import Items" window. Clicking on the "Open Recent" toolbar button. This will open a window with a list of feeds with the date that items where last imported from that feed.

Double clicking on http://www.feedforall.com/blog-feed.xml will cause that feed to be opened and all items that have been added to the feed since the last import to be selected. This makes importing only the new items very easy. Clicking on "Import" will import the selected items into the current feed.

Doing the same with http://www.softwaremarketingresource.com/blog-feed.xml will add the new items from that feed also. When items are imported in this manner, will fill in the tags with the information of the feed that the item came from. This is usually required when republishing items from other feeds.

There is a third feed that I want to start importing items from into my feed. To do this I will open http://diggtheblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml in Safari. Dragging the feed by the little icon into the list of items will bring up a dialog asking if you want to open the feed or import the items. The same happens if dragged into the list of feeds, but the default option is open feed instead.

Selecting "Import into this feed" will open the "Import Items" window. Since this feed has never been used as an import source before, none of the items will be auto selected. Select the first few items and "Import".

The "Mark by Date" button will all automatic marking of all items that are newer then the date selected.

The next time you try to import from any of these feeds all the new items will automatically be selected, makes keeping your feed up to date easy.

For more information and other tutorials check the help system the comes with FeedForAll Mac or the FeedForAll web site at http://www.FeedForAll.com/.

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You have created and published your podcast, but you want it listed on the iTunes Music Store (ITMS). To be able to have your podcast listed in the ITMS your podcast must include special information. Adding this information is easy with FeedForAll Mac.

Adding support for iTunes® is easy. Click on the "Extensions" tab. On that tab is a list of all of the XML Namespaces currently in use in the current feed. To add iTunes®, click on the "+" then select "itunes - http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" from the top of the list and click on "Accept".

Since in the last episode we set some default values for some of the iTunes® fields you are being asked if it is okay to update you existing items with these values. Click on "Yes" to update.

Next we need to fill in the missing information on the iTunes® tab. You can use a shortcut to copy the values from "Title" and "Description" into "Subtitle" and "Summary". Control-Click in "Subtitle" and select "Copy from Title". Do the same in "Summary" selecting "Copy from Description".

The ITMS allows you to select up to 3 categories for your feed. To add a category, click on the "+" under "Category". I am going to use use "Arts" and the subcategory of "Visual Arts". After selecting both of them, click "Accept".

The ITMS also allows you to enter no more then 12 comma separated keywords or phrases. These are used when people search within the ITMS.

The last field that we should fill in for our podcast is the iTunes® Image. The reason this is here is the ITMS wants an image that is larger then allowed by the RSS 2.0 specifications. The image must also be a JPEG or PNG image type.

Now that we have filled in the iTunes® information for the feed, we must do the same for our items. We will copy the "Title" and "Description" into the "Subtitle" and "Summary" the exact same way we did before and enter our keywords for this episode.

Lastly we need to fill in the "Duration". In the "Enclosure" section we filled in the size of the audio file in bytes. This is where you enter how long the episode will last in hours, minutes and seconds.

The last three things we need to do is save the feed, publish to our web server and then submit it for inclusion in the ITMS.

After publishing has finished, launch iTunes® and go to the "Music Store" From the left menu select "Podcasts". In the middle of the screen there is a large button "Submit Podcast". From there just read and follow the screen to submit your podcast. If you have questions, there is an FAQ at http://www.apple.com/itunes/podcasts/faq.html.

For more information and other tutorials check the help system the comes with FeedForAll Mac or the FeedForAll web site at http://www.FeedForAll.com/.

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The preferences in FeedForAll Mac are very powerful. This power comes from the time that can be saved by removing repetitive typing.

In preferences you are able to fill default values for almost all the fields in the base RSS 2.0 specifications, well supported namespace and user-defined namespaces.

The top section, "Current Feed", contains the default values that will be used when a new item is created for the currently open feed. These values also have precedence over the values in the "All Feeds" section.

The "All Feeds" section contain the default values that are used when a new feed is created. This includes the fields on the "Feeds", "Items" and "Image" tabs. It is also possible to set the defaults for any of the namespaces that are defined, so that if the namespace is used in a feed it will have default values.

Since I want the "Webmaster ", "Editor" and "Copyright" to have the same value on all feeds I create, I will fill in the default values that I want. I also want all newly created items to list me as the author so I will also fill that in. I also want to let FeedForAll Mac automatically generate a unique GUID so I don’t have to worry about that.

I will do the same for the iTunes® "Author", "Owner Name" and "Owner Email" at the feed level and "Author" at the item level.

And since I want to create podcasts for the iTunes Music Store, I will add that to be in all newly created feeds.

Values in preferences only are used when creating a new feed or item. So before I create a second item for our feed I will fill in some of the fields on the "Optional" tab that are not required, but recommended.

Looking we can see the feed and our enclosure are selected to be published. Clicking on Publish uploads the files to our web server.

Now to add a second item to our podcast. Like before we need a title, description and link. But when we switch to the "Optional" tab to add the audio file to enclosures we see that the information that we added in "Preferences" is filled in for us.

For more information and other tutorials check the help system the comes with FeedForAll Mac or the FeedForAll web site at http://www.FeedForAll.com/.

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Once you have created your podcast or feed you will want to make it available to others. This is done by publishing it to a server on the Internet. FeedForAll Mac allows publishing of your feed to your .Mac account, to web servers via FTP and by copying to a server on your local network.

Clicking on the Publish Feed button in the Feed tab's toolbar will bring up the Publish window. Since this the first time publishing we will have to create a publishing site. To do this click on New.

I will be publishing to a Standard FTP/FTPS account. Publishing to .Mac Account or Local Files is basically the same. All types require a Site Name, this is to make it easy for you to know what each one is. You can make it as short or as long as you want.

First we must fill in the information about our FTP server. The Server Name is the domain name of the server without any ftp://. Then your username and password. In most cases the rest of the fields can be left at their defaults.

To determine the Feed Path, using the Browse button is the easiest way to ensure it is correct. Browse will connect to the ftp server and show you a listing of the files and directories. A lot of web hosting companies put the files for your website in a subdirectory named public_html or similar.

You can change directories by double clicking on folders until you are in the directory you want. Once there click Accept.

Since we said our enclosure was in a directory name audio we can specify that right in the site configuration. Click the Disclosure button next to enclosures. Since we don’t want to use the same path as the feed we must unclick the check box and then we can browse. First we must go into the public_html directory and then create a new folder named audio. Do this by typing audio into the Create new folder box. Then click Create and Accept.

Now we can click Done.

Looking we can see the feed and our enclosure are selected to be published. Clicking on Publish uploads the files to our web server.

Once completed the status is displayed at the bottom. If there are any problems, clicking on View Log will display the whole publish log file and show more information about any errors.

When done click on Close, and you have just published your podcast or feed to the internet.

For more information and other tutorials check the help system the comes with FeedForAll Mac or the FeedForAll web site at http://www.FeedForAll.com/.

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Today I will walk you through creating a feed using FeedForAll Mac's "Feed Creation Wizard".

We will create a simple podcast. The "Feed Creation Wizard" walks through step-by-step prompting you for the fields that are required for the type of feed or podcast you are creating.

All feeds need a title ...

... and a description. The description is just a short summary of the contents of the feed.

The link is a URL of a website which contains information about this feed. Here we can either stop creating the feed and save it or we can continue on creating our first item. We will create an item.

The title of an item is the title.

The description is similar to the feed's description, a short summary of what the item is about.

The link is the URL of a web page with information about this item.

The enclosure. Enclosure is what makes a feed a podcast. The enclosure is a pointer to a file, usually audio; sometimes video or other types, which contains content. FeedForAll Mac has the ability to select files off of your computer to be uploaded with the feed. It will also automatically fill in the length and the type. The URL is the URL of where the file will be found on the web server.

There we are done. We created a podcast with a single item. We will click "Finish". And as always it is a good idea to save your work as you progress. Then a quick look shows our item is there with our enclosure and is already filled in with the file. In a later podcast when we upload this podcast you will see that this is a very good feature and will save a lot of time in creating and uploading your podcast.