Paged Feeds (Episode Archives)

[timpritlove]

At Podlove, we have set up a recommendation to use RFC 5005 in podcast feeds in order to make old episodes available:

http://podlove.org/paged-feeds/

This spec has been implemented by a variety of Podcast Clients and we think this is a very important thing to have as it allows to

• keep subscription feeds small
• have listeners have access to the full back catalogue of a podcast
• allows podcast directories to list all your episodes
• allows to refer to any episode via episode GUID

Some podcasts might not care about their old episodes but for most of them the back catalogue is gold. Being able to search for old episodes within the same client makes things easy.

[theDanielJLewis]

I suggest 5 tags to cover this:

• current page
• next page
• previous page
• first page
• last page

This could be done with relationship-indicated <link> tags. For example, here's how Apple does it:

<link rel="self" href="…" />
<link rel="first" href="…" />
<link rel="last" href="…" />
<link rel="previous" href="…" />
<link rel="next" href="…" />

However, paged feeds present issues for both producers app clients.

For producers, this means creating and hosting multiple feed files, possibly differentiated by URL parameters, which could cause server load issues. Plus, multiple feed files means that many more HTTP requests when a podcast client refreshes the subscription.

For podcast clients, this means parsing every page of the feed.