Proposed tag: <podcast:frequency> display how often new episodes are released

[cio-blubrry]

I am glad to see how things are proceeding with the podcast namespace. It has copied many of the rawvoice namespace tags such as rawvoice:rating (podcast:contentRating), rawvoice:location (podcast:location), rawvoice:webm and rawvoice:mp4 (podcast:alternateEnclosure), rawvoice:metamark (podcast:chapters), rawvoice:subscribe (podcast:id), rawvoice:donate (podcast:funding), etc...

ref: https://rawvoice.com/services/tools-and-resources/rawvoice-rss-2-0-module-xmlns-namespace-rss2/

Todd Cochrane has had me watch the progress closely. Everything is great so far and the way this namespace is evolving is making us evaluate how this namespace could replace the rawvoice namespace.

One of the important tags we still use that has not been proposed is the "frequency" tag. With the rawvoice namespace, this is used in the Blubrry podcast directory to display a readable description of how often the given show will be releasing episodes.

Goal: Give services and apps information to display to users how often they should expect episodes.

e.g.
<podcast:frequency>Twice a week</podcast:frequency>
e.g. 2
<podcast:frequency>Monday, Wednesday, Friday</podcast:frequency>

I suggest limiting the characters to 50.

I am excited to see feedback on this and where folks want to take it, perhaps additional attributes that say which day of the week, etc...

Thanks,
Angelo

[stuartjmoore]

This is great for a human-readable schedule, but an attribute that podcasting apps can use to schedule updates by could help speed things up:

<podcast:frequency rule="…">Twice a week</podcast:frequency>

I don’t have a rule format set in stone, but something from the calendar world might be an easy transition: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5545#section-3.8.5

With this, a weekly Monday–Thursday show may use:

<podcast:frequency ruleStart="[date of first episode]" ruleFreq="WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO,TU,WE,TH">Weekly, Monday–Thursday</podcast:frequency>

Where the rule starts its calculation based off of the ruleStart date.

Many, very complex variations can be created, and there must be a million libraries out there to calculate dates using this format.

[Tombarr]

Isn't this covered, at least in part, by the syndication namespace (http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/) that some hosts use? (Specifically, updateFrequency and updatePeriod). See https://web.resource.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/