FYI – Feed sizes

I was one of the folks requesting the 20 episode limit be increased (and thank you @tstachlewski for adding the ability to increase size). But, I guess I should be careful what I wish for ??

We were working with a client with over 300 blog posts (which are now Amazon Polly podcasts) and were having intermittent feed validation issues because of connection timeouts. I’m not a podcasting professional, so some of you may already know this, but I’ll share what I’ve learned today for the benefit of the group:

– 300 podcasts is wayyyyyy too much! You’ll get connection timeouts, slow loads, and some providers might cease refreshing your feed

– Check the filesize of your /feed/amazon-pollycast/ XML file. It needs to be less than 500kb (and arguably, half of that).

– Apple has a hard limit of 300 episodes per feed (our client had around 380, so 80 of them got dropped).

– All of the descriptive information in your XML file (post title, description, keywords) contributes to your feed’s file size. While it is good for SEO to have detailed descriptions and keywords, be mindful of feed size.

Bottom line is, rather than just post everything carte blanch, it is wiser to serve out a small set of podcasts, whether it be your 50 most recent posts or a curation of your best posts. I read that many podcasters consider 25-50 episodes to be the sweet spot.

Hope this helps!

PS – found this podcast validation tool, very helpful: https://podba.se/validate/#

Joe