I’m working on a couple of sites for folks, either creating new pages and programming, or doing some fixes. One of the sites is Molly Holzschlag’s, in particular fixing her syndication feeds.
The problem with Molly’s feed didn’t arise until she linked to three MP3 files in one post. WordPress 1.5 automatically links any MP3 file as an enclosure, but in this case, doing so generated problems with both the RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds.
The encoding of the MP3 link is a problem, but that’s fixable. The Atom feed is breaking because the program is using RSS enclosures, while Atom supports a link element for each media file. However, this should also be fixable.
What isn’t is how multiple enclosures are handled within RSS 2.0. WordPress creates a separate enclosure for each different MP3 file, yet according to what I can find online, RSS 2.0 only allows for one enclosure. Unfortunately, among all the punditry related to this issue, there’s no solution for multiple media links in a post. Unless someone has another solution, I’ll be changing the code to just enclose whichever is the first file — it’s not a good solution, but it’s better than the feed breaking.
Whatever fixes I do for Molly I’ll also apply to Wordform, since this application is currently using the WordPress feed programs, as is. The main difference is that I’ve added a flag to turn off or on automated enclosures.