Just refreshed and released, Beta 0.16 of the [renamed”>MP3 file Podcaster iKit for the iPhone and iPod Touch! This simple little web page parses your podcast’s XML feed and slaps it into a nice page designed to render well in Safari, which is the browser on which the iPhone and iPod Touch operate. It also grabs your feed’s image and displays it as the icons.
See the demo here.

Remember that neither Flash nor Java are supported on the iPhone, but Quicktime is, so all links to episodes go straight to the MP3 files.

Three other things:

1. iPhones and iPod Touches apparently use the tel:// handler, so you’ll want a US-formatted call-in number so that iPhone users can tap and call your show comment line right on the page.

2. The directory has now been shorted to i – so the URL is http://www.FinancialAidPodcast.com/i or http://www.YourShowName.com/i – this is to speed up getting to the page on a mobile keyboard.

3. Also, iPhones and iPod Touches have a screen width of 480 pixels, so the page generated is limited to 470 to allow for a margin of error.

How to install:

• Download the Financial Aid Podcast Podcaster iKit.
• Unzip the folder, which should be called i
• Edit the config.php file with a text editor like Notepad, BB Edit, etc. and set all values as appropriate.
• Copy the entire folder to your podcast’s web site.
• You may need to set the folder’s permissions to writeable, depending on your web host.
• Link to your iPod/iPhone-ready site from your podcast’s home page.
• Enjoy iKit goodness!

The Podcaster iKit is licensed under the Creative Commons 3.0 US By Attribution, Non-Commercial, Sharealike license. Absolutely positively no technical support is provided with this software. It is shared as-is.

• Update: Beta 0.16 adds in iPod Touch detection.
• Update: Beta 0.15 adds in iPhone detection and displays a message for non-iPhone users to subscribe to your podcast.
• Update: Beta 0.14 corrects the URL handler for telephone numbers after trying it out on a real iPhone.
• Update: Beta 0.13 restricts episodes to the last 5 to better display on the phone.
• Update: Beta 0.12 posted with a fix for feeds that don’t use the enclosure URL as the GUID.
• Update: Beta 0.11 posted with a fix for a missing cache folder.