RSS Feed Converter
Pando offers a "feed converter" service that allows Podcasters to provide Pando RSS feeds generated from existing Podcasts without requiring any engineering. This service subscribes to your PodCast and automatically repackages your feed as a Pando RSS feed, which you can then promote on your web site.
The advantages of Pando RSS feeds include:
- No bandwidth cost - Pando delivers your data at no cost to you, no matter how large the files or how many subscribers you have.
- Higher quality - Pando lets you send higher quality video than standard PodCasts.
- Works with FeedBurner, a very popular free service that provides data about subscribers to your feeds.
This service is available by request. If you would like us to convert your Podcast to Pando RSS, please send email to
laird@pando.com with "Pando RSS" in the subject line.
Please provide the following information in your request:
- The URL you'd like converted
- An approximate number of current subscribers.
- The format(s) of enclosed files.
- How frequently new items are added to the feed (weekly? daily? hourly?)
While we can process pretty much any Podcast, you may want to read more details about the
Pando RSS Feed Converter input format in order to take advantage of Pando's capabilities.
RSS Feed Converter Input Format
The Pando RSS Feed Converter is a tool that monitors an RSS "podcast" feed, automatically processing any enclosures and publishing the result as a Pando RSS feed. It can process a wide range of RSS "podcast" formats automatically.
Feed Setup
To set up Pando RSS Feed Convertor processing of an RSS feed, please provide the following:
- Feed Name (optional string, displayed to users in directory and application. If not provided, defaults to the channel's "title" element from the RSS feed.)
- Feed Description (optional string, displayed to users in directory. If not provided, defaults to the channel's "description" element from the RSS feed.)
- Feed URL (RSS 2.0 feed, specification at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss)
- Source URL (optional link to your web site)
- Sender Name (optional string, displayed in application. If not provided, defaults to channel "title" element from RSS feed.)
- Feed Thumbnail (optional graphic, 100x75 pixel PNG). Used as the default Package thumbnail for all feed items.
- Maximum number of items to serve in the feed (e.g. 3).
Feed Contents
Channel Data
The Pando RSS Feed Converter can process a wide range of RSS formats. We take advantage of the following RSS 2.0 attributes:
The RSS feed includes the following information for the channel:
- Channel Name. (Required string, displayed to users in directory and application.)
- Channel Description. (Required string, displayed to users in directory.)
Item Data
The RSS feed includes the following information for each item:
- title. This becomes the package title. Required.
- description. This becomes the package description. Optional.
- pubDate. This becomes the item's date in the RSS feed. Optional, but strongly encouraged.
- enclosure. This is the file that is retrieved and Pando packaged. Items without enclosures are ignored.
Limitations: All extended characters are stripped out, so that all file and package names are "safe" for all operating systems. This means that "Resumé" would become "Resum". Because the Pando client cannot display it, HTML and other special formatting / markup is also removed.