I apologize if your feeds have been updating continuously for the past several hours. I have been deep in the bowels of WordPress trying to get some things working that I have wanted for awhile but never had the time to do.

Here’s been the situation: as you know, I put each episode out in mp3 and ogg format. I currently have 2 RSS feeds, one for the mp3 files and one for the ogg files. Those feeds are set to contain all past episodes (42 and counting!). I want the feeds to have all episodes because I want new users to see all the topics covered in iTunes. This podcast in particular is most helpful when listened to in order, because often an episode will build on things dicussed previously. Other podcasts are easier to pick up in the middle.

However, some folks would rather not have a feed with all the episodes in it. I can understand that. So, I wanted to publish four feeds: mp3 (all episodes), mp3 (10 most recent), ogg (all episodes), and ogg (10 most recent). However, each episode must contain a link to the mp3 and ogg file for that episode as you can see here on the home page. And, here’s the kicker: being lazy, I also wanted it so that I would not have to publish more than one entry per episode. Other folks who have tacked a simliar problem have gotten around it by “double-posting” their entries. The problem is that having two audio files in one post makes it difficult to eliminate one file or the other depending on the feed, thus the double-posting solution. Post one entry for the mp3 and one for the ogg. I was pretty much doing the same thing already — posting here on the WordPress blog for the main (mp3) feed, and double posting at the LibSyn site for the ogg feed. Simple, but sorta kludgy and I did not want to have to do that if I did not have to. I even started looking around at other blogging/CMS solutions to see if I could find something that did what I wanted, but nothing out there that I could find had all the necessary elements.

So, I ended up using WordPress’s conditional tags, custom fields, and a third party plugin called “Get Custom Field Values,” and hacked together two new wp-rss2.php files. In the end, I think I got it working well. A side effect of this, however, was the updating feeds.

I will continue to test for a few days before publishing these new feeds but hopefully this solution will solve a lot of problems.