Pando Developer Tools

Pando supports RSS, combining the convenience of Podcasting with the efficiency of Pando. This allows you to efficiently deliver extremely large files, such as high quality audio or video, to your subscribers, without any file hosting or delivery costs.

For subscribers, this is more convenient than email Pando deliveries, because the delivery can take place automatically in the middle of the night, so there's no waiting! This makes it painless to send big, beautiful video files to your subscribers.

To make this even easier, Pando provides a mechanism so that you can enable one-click subscription to a Pando RSS feed on your web site.

In order to use Pando RSS there are three steps:

1. Publish a Pando RSS feed,
2. Test your Pando RSS feed.
3. Promote your Pando RSS feed

Setting up a Pando RSS Feed

A Pando RSS feed is a standard RSS 2.0 feed containing Pando files as enclosures.

The easiest way to run a Pando RSS feed is to use one one of the many existing RSS hosting services, such as Blogger, Yahoo 360 or LiveJournal.

Or, if you want to run your own site, there are numerous web site systems that produce RSS feeds, such as the one we use, Drupal.

If you are a programmer and wish to implement your own Pando RSS feed, or add Pando support to an existing RSS feed, you will want to read Building a Custom Pando RSS Feed.

Using an existing RSS server

The easiest way to set up a Pando RSS feed is to use Pando's "Send to Web" tool, and one of the many existing blogging services that support RSS 2.0. The "Send to Web" tool to generate HTML that you can copy and paste into your blog.

For example, the automatically generated HTML might look like:

<a href="http://cache.pando.com/soapservices/Package/
01_Big_Band_Serenade_70_Glenn_Miller_and_His_Orchestra_6_30_1939&7_14_39.mp3.pando?
id=E8F1ED96AC5A8F27EE9406E7B163FF80EC2AE706
&key=8913A9B268FB5A491711A8F191D30D669E04402355451D0A57453DD459553A0F"
title="01_Big_Band_Serenade_70_Glenn_Miller_and_His_Orchestra_6_30_1939&7_14_39.mp3.pando">
<img src="http://cache.pando.com/soapservices/SendToWeb/
E8F1ED96AC5A8F27EE9406E7B163FF80EC2AE706/Preview.png"
border="0" alt="Pando Package"/>
</a>

And if you post it into a blog posting the result looks like this:

If your blogging system supports enclosures (also referred to as "Podcasting"), we recommend putting the Pando file URL's into the enclosure fields. To do this, copy the "embed" link from the "Send to Web" tool.

http://cache.pando.com/soapservices/Package/
01_Big_Band_Serenade_70_Glenn_Miller_and_His_Orchestra_6_30_1939&7_14_39.mp3.pando?
id=E8F1ED96AC5A8F27EE9406E7B163FF80EC2AE706
&key=8913A9B268FB5A491711A8F191D30D669E04402355451D0A57453DD459553A0F

and paste it into the enclosure field. The details are different for each blogging platform.

Note that many blog hosting services require you to host linked files (images and enclosures) elsewhere. Pando hosts all of the Pando files, and takes care of the delivery of your audio or video files, so you can use any blogging platform that supports RSS 2.0 to publish Pando files and RSS feeds without having to arrange a separate file hosting service.

Testing your Pando RSS Feed

To make sure that your Pando RSS Feed works properly, you should subscribe to it using Pando.

First, you need to find your RSS feed URL. These are usually linked to on your blog with a label reading "RSS" or "Feed". This is often labeled with a button like this: .

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.

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.

Once you're happy with how everything looks, it's time to promote it.

Promote your Pando RSS Feed

To make it easy for your readers to subscribe to your Pando RSS feed, you can do a couple of things:

• Put a pando:subscribe link on your blog or web site. This will let people easily subscribe to your feed. Here is how to one-click subscribe on your web site,
• Tell us about it, and we'll add it to our list of Pando RSS Feeds on our web site. Send in a 468x60 pixel banner, and we might select your feed to be promoted to everyone using Pando!

Suggestions? Questions? Post a comment below.