Feed Times Out

[IndependentJo]

The problem: iTunes does not show the last 20+ podcasts we have posted with powerpress and feedvalidator.org says it has timed out when validating.

The feed: http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/feed/podcast/

In powerpress it shows all of the episodes and if I browse to that URL it does load the feed.

What am I doing wrong? Are there just too many episodes for iTunes?

[mgdell]

The problem is one of two things..

1. Your feed has gotten too big.  You can fix this by limiting the number of posts in your feed by setting your wordpress > settings > reading > Syndication feeds show the most recent to 50 or so.  This will reduce the size of your feed (which should be less then 512mb for feed readers to deal with).  Your older episodes will still be available on your website, but not in your feed.

2. Your webhost is slow. Depending on how the server is configured, you might just be having a slow connection to your site. It also could be that if you are on shared hosting, there is some high traffic sites on your server sharing bandwidth. 

As a side note, I notice you are hosting your media files at Archive.org.   They are very slow at delivering media files. Although I don't think this is causing your feed to time out, it will make your media come down very slowly and sometimes time out on the download.  Blubrry offers media hosting that is fast and reliable.  Check that out at http://store.blubrry.com

Michael Dell
Tech Support, RawVoice Inc.
p:1.877.729.8642
twitter: mgdell
gtalk: mgdell

[IndependentJo]

1. We know our feed is very large but we do not want to limit peoples ability to download all the old episodes off of iTunes.
2. Does the PowerPress feed "site.com/feed/podcast" actually load the main sites feed or just the information powerpress tells it to? I am wondering if all of the embeded videos are slowing it down because the powerpress feed is also loading those?

[angelo]

No one runs over 100 episodes in a feed and expects the feed to load in less than 2 seconds in an application. Important to note that most applications give up after 2-3 seconds waiting for the feed to return from the server. All the old timers ran into this problem back in 2005, you're repeating the same mistake.

I would recommend setting your limit to 30 (50 max). Anything over that and your asking for trouble.

If you don't believe us, pick some of your favorite podcasts listed on iTunes and see how many episodes they list in their feed.

[mgdell]

To answer your #2 question.  The 'site.com/feed/podcast/' feed only puts posts in the feed that have a media enclosure in them (podcasts).

-Mike

[IndependentJo]

Thank you for the great replies. I removed all of the "embeded" codes from my videos so that it will use the PowerPress java player instead. The page seems to load a little quicker but the podcasts are still not showing the latest episodes. I guess my only options now are to either reduce the amount of podcasts available (which I do not really want to do) or to move my host from archives.org to blubrry's. I did notice that other podcast applications are getting the podcast just fine. It seems to be a itunes issue with probably the data file being too big?

[angelo]

Looking at  http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/feed/podcast/  , I still see more than 50 episodes in this feed, it appears to be over 130, which is huge.

The goal is to make your feed load faster (http://www.richsoil.com/permaculture/feed/podcast/) If you clear your browser cache, enter that address in the address bar then hit enter, then start counting 1, 2, 3...  you will find that the feed takes over 10 seconds (16 seconds last time I tried) to load, which is way longer than most services wait. When a service no longer waits, they call it a "time out error".

I'm not sure why you are defying our advice and continue to complain about the feed problem. The number of items/episodes in your feed negatively impact how fast it can be created then downloaded by a client/browser.

The solution: set your "items per feed" setting to 30, and even that's a lot. WordPress ships with the default set to 10.

If you put the setting to 30 items per feed and your feed still takes over 10 seconds to load then contact your web hosting service to find out why your server is slow to load your feeds.

[angelo]

Also, your media hosted at blubrry.com or at archive.org means nothing to your feed or blog, that is not the problem. Now if you were hosting your media on the same server as your blog, then yes that would compound the problem, but even then the items per feed setting is too big, and it would require a pretty beefy server (which if you had, you would also have a server administrator constantly improving and managing it).

Even then, if you were able to deliver a really large feed quickly from your web server (which your currently not), you're still throwing a lot of data into someone's feed application which slows that down as well. It's like trying to put 100 gallons of gas in a Honda Civic, you can do it if you add extra fuel cell tanks all about the car, but you're going to piss a lot of people off.

[IndependentJo]

Thank you for the great advice Angelo. I do not mean to complain I am just trying to understand how it works. You explanation is perfect. I now get it.