Hi All;
Well; this is still ongoing. I use my mobile (a Nokia N series device) to subscribe to podcasts using the built-in podcast receiver; it works flawlessly for all my podcast sources except EscapeArtist feeds. It used to work here too but started playing up in May (about the time of
this posting).
Like others note it comes and goes; I check most days and very occasionally it works (seems to be related to you just releasing a new item) and I can download what I'm missing. Next time I refresh it will be failing again.
So; I sat down just now to see what is happening; I think the answer is that you are sending the feed out compressed (gzipped, mod_deflate) and not all devices can deal with that, or maybe your compression is incorrect. FFox, iTunes, and other more sophisticated feed readers have no problem but any reader (eg based on older XML libraries etc) that is not aware of this form of compression will choke on the seemingly random garbage returned.
I tried fiddling with UserAgent strings to see if I could get any difference in the returned data but this does not seem to make a difference in my limited test; I wanted to see if you were trying to serve the feed compressed/plain based on UA identifier. This started about the same time you were trying to reduce the bandwidth and playing with the feed contents, so I'm guessing this was caused by part of that work.
I like the 'full' feeds and extra info when I look in the browser; but maybe we could have a really basic feed with just the last X (50?) audio episodes, text description, enclosure link and nothing else.. and uncompressed?
- This would greatly benefit people like me who want to just get the audio onto simple/older devices. And would probably still be a smaller download than the compressed version of the full feed.