bedeviled mojo slop

A blog entry on Geek News Central, Podcasting Catcher Software a work in progress, brings up a good point that podcasting clients need to be smarter about downloading podcasts and when to not download podcasts. I don't have any real numbers, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that in comparison to their enclosing RSS feeds, podcasts are hugeish Let's say I put a 1 MB podcast on my blog. That's going to be roughly 222 times bigger than the enclosing RSS feed which is typically around 4.5 K.

Do podcasting clients have a checkbox where you can say, "Do not download deleted/missing podcasts"? If not, they need one. I believe in iPodderX, the podcasting client I've used, there's an option to download only the most recent X number of podcasts. I believe I set ths option to 1. That at least helps with the initial sucking down of the podcasts from a particular feed.

Do podcasting clients have an option to automatically wipe out podcasts older than say a week, a month, some configurable amount of time? That'd be a great option. That way I wouldn't have to delete old podcasts myself. And maybe you prompt me just in case ... pretty please, with sugar on top.

The blog entry ends on the wrong "note" however:

Podcasters are most to blame because their RSS feeds still have these old shows. Someone fix this please!

What?! That's sort of like saying, "Bloggers are most to blame because their RSS feeds still have these old entries."

Podcasters shouldn't need to track who has downloaded their podcasts. That information is best stored with the podcasting client. Maybe it's a checkbox that gets set next to the individual podcasts your client has retrieved to mark an item as downloaded. As long as this bit is set, even if the podcast is deleted from your music program and your hard drive, it won't ever be downloaded again.

And hey, your RSS feed is showing items from Sunday, December 5th 2004. Somone fix this please!