RSS length questions

[yakk0dotorg]

I was wondering how everyone managed the length of their RSS feeds. I had ours set at 10 posts since I started my podcast, but recently one of our hosts asked me to increase it. I bumped it up to 25 yesterday and saw a big increase in downloads of older episodes. Usually we'll have one or two every few days on the episodes that are older than two months, and the download numbers for the February and March episodes totaled over 55 downloads for each month.

Was this just podcatchers downloading newly available content or is this a case to be made for not limiting the RSS feed?

[sunkast]

Most likely it's due to applications like iTunes or podcasting app seeing the episodes as new and grabbing them. I generally keep mine set to 10-12. If your RSS feed is too large, it can fail to be read by iTunes and other apps.

[yakk0dotorg]

From day 2 of this, it looks like you're right, though the numbers are still higher than normal. I think we'll keep it at 25 and see how it affects us long-term. I have seen some really long feeds, and don't think there's a reason to go longer than what we're at.