Just released, Beta 0.15 of the Podcaster iPhone Kit! 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 operates. 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.

Two other things - iPhones 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. Also, iPhones 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 iPhone Kit.
• Unzip the folder, which should be called iphone
• 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 iPhone-ready site from your podcast’s home page.
• Enjoy iPhone goodness!

The Podcaster iPhone Kit 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 0.15 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.

As a bonus, if you are fluent with PHP, insert this code into the header of your blog template and it will automatically redirect any iPhone to the iPhone specific page on your site:

$browser = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$string=”iPhone”;

if(strstr($browser,$string)){
header("Location:http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/iphone");
}