README.md in dropcaster-0.0.3 vs README.md in dropcaster-0.0.4

- old
+ new

@@ -108,18 +108,22 @@ Advanced features ================= Overriding defaults ------------------- -Dropcaster is opinionated software. That means, it makes a number of assumptions about names, files, and directory strictures. Dropcaster will be most easy to use if these assumptions and opinions apply to your way of using the program. +Dropcaster is opinionated software. That means, it makes a number of assumptions about names, files, and directory structures. Dropcaster will be most simple to use if these assumptions and opinions apply to your way of using the program. However, it is still possible to override Dropcaster's behavior in many ways. You can, for instance, host your episode files on a different URL than the channel. Instead of writing title, subtitle, etc. to a channel.yml, you may also spedify them on the command line. In order to find out about all the options, simply run $ dropcaster --help +Using custom channel templates +------------------------------ +Dropcaster generates a feed that is suitable for most podcast clients, especially iTunes. It is also possible to customize the channel by supplying an alternative channel template on the command line. Start your own template by copying the default template, or look at the test directory of the dropcaster gem. You can get there by running `gem open dropcaster`. + Sidecar files ------------- You may override the meta data for any episode by providing a YAML file with the same name as the mp3 file, but with an extension of yml or yaml (ususally refered to as [sidecar file](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidecar_file)). Any attributes specified in this file override the ID tags in the mp3 file. Dropcaster will only write the sidecar file if the appropriate command line option was passed, and it will use the information in it only for generating new files like the index.rss. It will not write back to mp3 files. @@ -132,12 +136,24 @@ -------------------------------- The whole concept of Dropcaster works perfectly fine without Dropbox. Just run the Dropcaster script in a directory of mp3 files and upload the files as well as the generated index.rss to a web server. Leave the relative position of the index and mp3 files as is, otherwise the path to the mp3 files in index.rss will become invalid. Episode Identifier (uuid) ------------------------- -Dropcaster uses a rather simple approach to uniquely identify the episodes. It simply generates a SHA1 hash of the mp3 file. If it changes, for whatever reason (even if only a tag was changes), the episode will get a new UUID, and any podcatcher will fetch the episode again (which is what you want, in most cases). +Dropcaster uses a rather simple approach to uniquely identify the episodes. It simply generates a SHA1 hash of the mp3 file. If it changes, for whatever reason (even if only a tag was changed), the episode will get a new UUID, and any podcatcher will fetch the episode again (which is what you want, in most cases). Modifying the sidecar file does not change the UUID, because it only affects the feed and not the episode itself. + +I Don't Like the Output Format that Dropcaster produces +------------------------------------------------------- +Dropcaster uses an ERB template to generate the XML feed. The template was written so that it is easy to understand, but not necessarily in a way that would make the output rather nice-looking. That should not be an issue, as long as the XML is correct. + +It you prefer a more aesthetically pleasing output, just pipe the output of Dropcaster through `xmllint`, which is part of [libxml](http://xmlsoft.org/), which in turn is one of the prerequisites of the Dropcaster gem, and, as such, installed with Dropcaster): + + dropcaster | xmllint --format - + +For writing the output to a file, just redirect the ouput of the above command: + + dropcaster | xmllint --format - > index.rss Contributing to Dropcaster ========================== Dropcaster is hosted at [Github](http://github.com/nerab/dropcaster):