Why doesn't the RSS feed have all of the episodes in?

Probably one for @sil. Can we have all the episodes in the feed, please?

Two reasons:

  1. Because a new person discovers Bad Voltage, thinks, “ooh I like this”, adds the feed to their podcatcher, and it downloads thirty episodes and they get cross with us (you may think: that’s their podcatcher’s fault, and you’d be right, but I’d rather be wrong and helpful than smugly right and irritate our listeners)
  2. There seems to be no way to tell podpress to create a feed with all the episodes in it; the “max amount of posts per feed” setting is ignored. See Bad Voltage for iOS for previous discussion on this point.

I wonder, if we can figure out the issue with podpress, whether we could have a different RSS feed with all episodes in it?

Feel free to make me a spec and I’ll write something to replace podpress! It’s not fun having to go and download them from the mobile site one by one.

@jonobacon: I’m more than happy to have multiple rss feeds, and podpress supposedly allows it (and I have configured it so), it just doesn’t work :frowning:

@joe: I’d much rather that you were to fix bugs in podpress if you’re interested in working on this; I’m not eager to betatest a newly-created extension for our rss feed, which is a super-critical bit of infrastructure. However, if you’re downloading lots of episodes at once, the naming scheme may be useful: shows are named http://audio.lugradio.org/badvoltage/Bad%20Voltage%201x30.mp3 and the 1x30 can be changed to 1x29, etc, etc.

Can’t even get the download to work :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ll have a brief look. I left professional PHP dev a few months ago, would like to stay away from that :smile:

Looking into this, PodPress hasn’t been updated since 2008. I’m looking at the PHP now, to see if I can find the bug.

In the mean time, https://wordpress.org/plugins/podlove-podcasting-plugin-for-wordpress/ ?

Quoting from Adding Simple Chapters to the feed, “I’ve looked at the Podlove thing, but anything saying the plugin is currently in Beta and still under heavy development doesn’t get used, not yet”…

Ah, sorry, I missed that. I’ll see what I can do with PodPress, but don’t hold your breath.

Yeah, this is the issue here – podpress is ancient and unmaintained, but nobody’s come up with an alternative which actually has sticking power. Perhaps podlove will be that alternative, but I don’t want to sod about with a basically working thing and be a guinea pig for testing stuff. I don’t mind doing that if it’s a core part of a project, but it isn’t here…

Yep, totally agree, between a rock and a hard place.

I’ll fanny around with it if I have a moment and pop it on GitHub.

That’s an understatement. After doing some Googling, it seems that Podpress is quite dated if not dead and that last version was released in 2007!. Surely, people haven’t been satisfied in the 9 years to have kept using it –the entire market of smartphones didn’t exist that long ago.

As far as I can tell, nobody’s been dissatisfied enough to build and stick with a replacement. There are quite a few attempts which have withered on the vine, and a couple (podlove most prominent among them) which are currently being developed, but there seems to be nothing which is a replacement, is maintained, and is fully written rather than halfway through being written and still in beta. I would very much like to be proved wrong on this point.

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