Pando Developer Tools

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.