What exactly is an RSS feed and how/why would you use one?

Best way to set up RSS for a party-paywalled radio show?

• I have a question about how best to use RSS feeds for a subscribers-only, paywalled podcast. I'm an open Web kind of guy with an aversion to paywalls, but one of my clients had me set up one. It restricted access to about half of the weekly show's MP3s, so that only paying customers could log in on Wordpress to listen to both the free and premium shows. After ironing out all the bugs in the paywall, we found ourselves faced with an RSS problem. Listeners complained that they could no longer find the show on iTunes or on a podcast reader of their choice. Which seems reasonable, considering that podcasts are supposed to be portable and iPod-friendly instead of being restricted to 1999-style Web listening. But I can't figure out the best way to handle a situation like this. Should the RSS feed include everything, but use password-protect authentication to require logins? If so, does that get our part-free, part-not-free RSS feed kicked off iTunes? The iTunes FAQ says it doesn't support password-protected podcasts--maybe some other service does? Or should we just give iTunes a stripped-down RSS feed with just the free ones and nothing else? Any help much appreciated if you have ever had experience with something like this.

• Answer:

  You can only put free podcasts on itunes. Create two feeds if you want to list anything on there. The customers' readers are going to have to support logins to get the premium feed if it's protected that way. Your power users can use something like Pipes to convert the premium feed into a public feed that they can use on any reader.