two changes to our feed
by Dan Repperger
For years, we’ve used PodPress to handle the podcasting functions on WordPress. Unfortunately, PodPress is no longer supported, and I’ve been warned that newer versions of WordPress don’t get along with it anymore.
To deal with that, I switched us over to PowerPress. The transition seems to have gone smoothly, but if you notice anything strange on your podcatcher over the next few days, please let me know.
Also, our RSS feed has gotten too large for most aggregators to handle it anymore. iTunes is truncating it and BluBrry won’t even process it. To deal with that, I’ve had to set our feeds to only show the 100 most recent entries. Shouldn’t be a problem unless you’re way back in our catalog of shows. I’m annoyed I had to do this, but the technology isn’t giving me much of a choice.
Will the ancient scriptures that don’t make the cut still be available in an archive?
Perhaps you could make an archival feed of the first 100 episodes in case anyone wants to catch up from the beginning?
The feed size issue vs providing evergreen content is a hard one to deal with. On one side, if everyone had 2-4M in size feeds, directories like blubrry or iTunes wouldn’t be able to pull them efficiently. On the other hand, there’s still relevant content that could be included in the feeds.
I’ve been thinking about adding a feature to PowerPress that would allow users like yourself to include all your episode/posts by simply removing some of the excessive attributes in the feed for very old posts. For example, say post/episode 51 and older would have the non-essential iTunes tags removed and the main description replaced with an excerpt. The change would allow you to display more items in the feed while keeping the feed size below 512K.
If you’re interested in such a feature, please shoot me an email with your thoughts.
I was four episodes from catching up! Episodes 95-98, I never knew ye. Thanks for posting about this, I was curious as to what had happened.
You could still grab them from the website’s archive SpectacledBear: http://www.feartheboot.com/ftb/index.php/archives/category/podcasts/regular-episodes/page/9
Thank you Ian! I read the post and thought they had been removed in general.
@SpectacledBear – What Ian said is correct. I’m not deleting the old episodes. You can still download them directly from the site. They just won’t appear in the RSS feed anymore.
@Angelo Mandato – That’s exactly what I was contemplating. I was going to create a stripped down RSS feed that just had the bare bones content needed to subscribe to our entire catalog. It’d be missing all the bells and whistles, but it would be under the 512k limit. Per your request, I’ll follow up with you via email. It’s awesome you stay on top of people using your software and are so responsive to their needs!
Dan,
There may be a work around for iTunes to gather more of your back catalog. You could create an RSS feed for just the podcasts (similar to the category archive link Ian provides) and have that be the feed that Apple’s aggregator uses as opposed to it parsing the “general” feed that includes all of the blogs and other items. Given the smaller amount of content in the “shows only” feed, iTunes may be able to pick up episodes further back.
I’m almost certain there’s a way for WordPress to create the category specific feed just as it does the category specific link. Hope that helps!
By the way, the show is just one position away from the first page of the “Other Games” category on iTunes. If you asked a few of your regular listeners to subscribe to the feed (even if they usually listen from the web site), it may bump you onto the first page!
I’ll have to make one that’s further stripped down than that. We do have a podcast only feed (http://www.feartheboot.com/ftb/index.php/podcast) the problem is that it’s also over 512kb in size. In order to get the whole catalog out there, I’ll have to create a custom one that’s stripped down to almost nothing. Shows, titles, and that’s pretty much it. No show notes, no iTunes special tags, etc.
As for our placement on iTunes, I may ask people to subscribe on the next show. But I’m not too worried about the placement. It changes from week to week (sometimes day to day). I checked a few days ago, and we were not only on the first page, we were the first item on the first page. I’ve seen us bounce all over the place on their list.
Phew, glad I spend the lat two months listening to nothing but FTB.
In a very Single White Female sort of way.