thanks very much! that's working quite well.

<hr> is also not allowed in XHTML. You have to use the self-closing hr tag <hr />.

Also in XHTML you cannot use uppercase in HTML tags. Tags must be lowercase.

HR WIDTH="75%" COLOR="#FF0000" SIZE="4"

I need the line to be red because the background is black. Am I doing something wrong? Does wordpress.com support this?

Thanks very much for your help.

I've uploaded MP3s into my blog at http://blueplanetalmanac.wordpress.com/blue-planet-radio-page/ and also, as test, to http://blueplanetalmanac.wordpress.com/podcasts/. I used the "test" page to see if any of the text appearing on the page was causing a problem.

But I get the same errors from either page.

Error 1: If I append "feed" to the URL, the response I receive is, "The feed has no episodes."

Error 2: When I paste either of those URLS into iTunes' "Submit Podcasts to the iTunes Directory", I get error messages saying, "Error parsing feed:Invalid XML:Error on line 105:The element type "br" must be terminated by the matching end-tag "</br>".

Anyone know what I'd doing wrong and need to change?

I have categorized my post as Podcast and when I attempt to submit the podcast to iTunes I am still unable to see the artwork, author or short description that is visible when I add the RSS feed to Firefox. I feel this will hinder the publishing of the podcast but I am still waiting on approval.

Does anybody have any idea why this is happening?

That's what I meant in the last post question.

Now, how do I get to th next step of getting an MP3 onto Itunes?

Raincoaster, you're my hero.

Now Itunes is saying:

"Error parsing feed. Invalid XML"

What do those things mean? And why would it change from "timed out" to "invalid"?

http://inearnestexpectation.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/sess-1-forging-a-culture-where-the-book-of-revelation-is-treasured.mp3

Then I put it into a post:

http://daltonlifsey.com/2009/03/09/the-book-of-revelation-session-1-forging-a-culture-where-the-book-of-revelation-is-treasured/

Then I submit it to the Itunes store and everytime it reads:

"We experienced a timeout connecting to this feed at this time. Read timed out."

What am I doing wrong? And why can every man and his dog post a podcast but I can't figure it out for the life of me? It can't be that hard.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Any ideas why this might be happening?

A feed is an XML file, which is a coded version of your page that contains all the information needed by another piece of software (e.g. iTunes) to understand it/update it/share it around.

If you want to create a podcast using WordPress you need to:
1, create a new post with a link to the mp3 file. (Call the post whatever you want the title of that podcast episode to be). Anything you type in the body of the post will show up as the 'show description' in the podcast
2, put the post in your 'podcasts' category (that you have created, right?).
3, paste the link: http://yourblog.wordpress.com/category/podcasts/feed into iTunes, or wherever needs to know the address of your feed.

That's all.

You can create buttons and register your podcast with iTunes and Feedburner and things like that, but that's mostly promotional stuff. The steps above will create a podcast and make it available. You can share the link above with anyone who wants to listen to your podcast.

You can upload the files and make them available to download following those instructions. If you want to make them playable, you need the WordPress Audio Player.

http://support.wordpress.com/audio/

Could anyone help me with a step by step? I haven't a clue how to do it.

Thank you!

Of course I had no idea what happens with IE, as I'm not using it (used to, back at the old days of OS 9, but obviously not now); judging from various forum complains, I only knew IE is a strange creature...

As for the "1.4", the idea came from another code I happened to use recently. I needed to have a block of text highlighted in a different background color, and with a plain div style...background-color...hex the leading (sorry for the DTP parlance!) got disrupted; so I added the "line-height" attribute and found that 1.4 would give me the standard wp blog line-spacing. But I guess I mis-applied it to this different situation.

Anyway - I've tried all these and we're all settled now: your first code for blank space in general (with the number adjusted as one sees fit), your 0.5em variant for a single blank line (with the number possibly doubled or tripled). Duly copied and saved, sir!

Many thanks for your time and advice.

Just a couple of recommendations:

a) Pixel values are absolute, so I would recommend to not use decimal values. For your example, it'd be better to use a value of 2px; or better yet, for the type of usage, I'd recommend using "em" units instead (i.e. height: 0.5em).

b) Semantically, using "p" tags wouldn't be correct in this case, that's why my recommendation on using "divs" instead. Also, one of the reasons of using this kind of approach, the use of extra elements would be unnecessary. So, if a user wants to add two "extra" lines, instead of writing two "div" or "p" tags with a height of 0.5em each, they can just double that value: 1em, and the results would be as expected. Additionally, "p" tags have a default margin that may double the intended height. So, in pixesl, instead of having a 1.4px height, in reality you'd have a height of 21.4 pixels (approximately 10px for each margin, top and bottom).

At home, I'm a mac user too. But as a web developer, I'm used to trying me websites look the same in as many browsers as possible, so we need to add one more attribute to this solution to make it look good in IE6.

You see, even if you set a height to an element, IE6 will keep a space/padding inside, as if something invisible is preventing it from making the height smaller than 15 or so pixels. Imagine having as many elements for as many blank lines, in Safari, Firefox, Camino, etc. the page would look as intended, but in IE6, the page would look really weird. So, to make it "behave" the same way Firefox or Safari would, I'd recommend using this revised code:

<div style="height:0.5em; overflow:hidden;"></div>

This should work well in all major browsers.

Hope this helps.

As I noted in my initial post in this thread, my suggestions were unstable. Once the simple p-p one used to work. Then it stopped working, so I experimented trying to find something additional inside it that would make it register, and came up with the +align version. Now this isn't working and the simple one does again. Once, in an exchange with thesacredpath, I told him that one of the two didn't work and he said for him it did (while he's a Mac user, I think, like me)... So we're talking about imperfect solutions: yours is a lot better.

Note that it also works with p instead of div. And I might add a variant, in case someone would rather measure blank space in terms of number of lines:
<p style="height:1.4px;"></p>
(as many times for as many blank lines)

You are right, "justify" is its fourth value. Since it's deprecated, and since I haven't used it for a long time, I forgot about it.

Well, It's great that you found a solution to this little "problem", and I believe my previous post wasn't to say otherwise, but to correct the use of the "none" value because people who may be starting to learn HTML might improperly use it. So to me, it's more than just satisfying "our sense of correctness".

Having said that, may I suggest a different approach?

Instead of using "p" tags, what if we start suggesting the use of this code

<div style="height:[20]px;"></div>

where 20 is a suggested value and the user can change it to fit their needs. I tested this on one of my blogs that don't have the CSS upgrade and it works.

Like one of my professors at college used to tell us: "this is just one way to do it." And since you already provided a solution, then I'd say "this is _another_ way to do it."