iTunesU

Over the last few weeks i have been working hard (hence the lack of posts) on iTunesU, the university i work at are to have a presence on the Apple service very soon, in fact Apple may be reviewing our site even as i type. Running parallel to the service on iTunes is a dedicated podcasts section on our own university website (the videos, mp3s and so on are all hosted on our web server and linked to from iTunes) which i have also been building up.

iTunesU links to our hosted files using RSS. At a later stage we hope to have these RSS feeds generated automatically by our CMS but in the meantime i had to hand-write the RSS (or rather take the Apple example and modify). That is OK for the odd new series but when you have dozens of them it can be a bit of a pain! For launch i had to create 83 RSS files.

The iTunesU back-end isn't the best (though isn't the worst, i have had to develop on Microsoft Merchant Server once!) and as it uses iTunes itself for the back-end this has problems (lack of a back button, refresh et cetera) but we got there in the end.

Overall the effect is very nice, the overall look and design of the iTunesU and tie-in graphics is very professional and the materials are overall of good quality (though a bit arty and media biased for now).

I won't link to our pages but we are doing something similar to the Open University for the portal page.