Pando Developer Tools

If you want to deliver video files to subscribers, here's an easy way to use Pando and Blogger together.

First, install Pando. We also recommend getting a Pando Publisher account so that you don't have to worry about package sizes or expiration.

Second, set up a free Blogger account. For example, I have set up a test blogger account.

Next, select a video file and send it using Pando. The steps are:

1. Run Pando
2. Click "send new"
3. Check "Web/IM", then select a video file to send.

You should see something like:



4. Select the HTML code and copy it.
5. In your blogger site, click "Posting", click in the big text field, and paste the HTML into the post.

You should see something like this:



6. Click "publish" to put the video out into your blog. You can preview first, if you want to make sure that everything looks right.

Then figure out your RSS URL. If your site is http://lairdp.blogspot.com/ then your RSS URL would be http://lairdp.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss. Note that by default Blogger provides ATOM feeds, while Pando only supports RSS, so you need to append the "?alt=rss" to the end of the URL to get an RSS feed that Pando can read.

Once you have the URL, you should make sure that it works properly with Pando. To do this, run Pando on another computer from where you published the files, open Pando's Preferences (on Mac) or Options (on Windows), and click on "RSS". Then click on the "Add RSS feeds" button. This will show a dialog box allowing you to enter the URL of the feed, and test it.

Click 'test' and Pando will verify that the URL is correct and that it finds enclosed Pando files. Then click 'subscribe' to start getting updates from the RSS feed.

The reason that you should test the downloads on a different computer from the one you uploaded it from is that Pando won't download files that it knows that you already have, so while the channel test will work, subscribing to your channel won't download anything.

One cool feature of Pando that you'll like is that we report actual download counts of every package that you send (displayed right in the Sent list), so you can see how many subscribers you have, and which packages are most popular.

The last step is telling your subscribers about the feed. You can do this by putting a Subscribe with Pando button on your web site, like this: .

The HTML for this button looks like this:

<a href="pando:subscribe?http://lairdp.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss"><img src="http://rss.pando.com/themes/rssvideo_customized/PandoSubscribe.png"></a>

Remember to substitute your RSS URL for mine, or you'll be subcribing your viewers to my not very interesting Blogger RSS feed.