This is The Talking Dead, a podcast dedicated to the AMC TV show The Walking Dead.

Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris and my name is Jason and this is episode number 642 recorded on Monday, September the 25th, 2023. Are you sure you're Jason?

I am I am sure I have a cold. Yeah, this is causing my voice to be lower than normal. Yeah, I can go really deep, which is a lot of fun. I like that. I like it. Yeah, so it I'm not sure what's going on. There's I got all kinds of flim in my throat. This is my biggest issue.

My nose is not running. I'm not I'm coughing a bit, but it's all throat related and not necessarily chest related. It's really weird. Oh, well, these things happen. I mean I was sick last month.

Remember, and my voice was all crazy and we powered through. So now it's your turn. I took a COVID test is turned up negative. Okay. We're all good. It's just I talked funny. That's fine. Funnier than usual. Let's put it down. Well, let's yeah, I mean, it's a sliding scale. It really is. All right. Well, I'm glad you're not feeling too bad.

And yeah, here we are. Here we are on the podcast. We're going to talk about the latest episode of the Darryl Dixon show. First, a little bit of housekeeping that I need to go through. Okay.

I was recently chatting with friend of the show in New Zealand and one. And she told me that recently the podcast has been updating very, very slowly for her.

Like new episodes take a long time to show up in her podcast app. And this is something that's happened before. I it's not a new thing to me. And I think it has to do with the size of our feed. Okay.

We've got 641 episodes in there over 14 years. The feed is rather large. Right. And I think it is maybe causing some slowdowns. Now, she's not the only person that mentioned to me, Steph and Northampton, Massachusetts brand and the internet. Oh, and leads like they all were like, it's a bit slow. Like, where's the new episode. But and when I spoke to directly.

The other thing people point out is when there are episodes missing from the feed, but basically what I've done Jason is I have limited our feed temporarily, hopefully, to the most recent 300 episodes. So little less than half of our complete catalog to make it smaller and do a test and see if it speeds things up.

So it's annoying. I know I've done this before. And every time I do it, people write in and be like, hey, where are all the old episodes go. I was listening from the beginning. I can't find them now. And I get it. That's annoying. And that sucks. And I hope I don't have to do this permanently. But for now, and for the next few weeks, I'm going to leave it at 300. New episodes will show up. Old ones won't be available.

And I just want to see if it if it fixes the problem for Anne, when first of all, because if it fixes it for her, hopefully it fixes it for other people.

But we'll see how it goes. But if there's no change, then that's not the problem. And I'll probably just put it back to the full all time list and look into potentially other solutions.

Distributing the podcast uses RSS, right? Yes, it does. Okay. So I think the internet needs to move on from RSS to RCS. So instead of real simple syndication, we need really complex syndication, which allows for growth at scale, obviously RSS is just not prepared to handle a podcast of this length and size.

No, it probably isn't. But here's the thing, like we are not the only podcast that has more than 600 episodes that has been around for this long.

I'll be honest, we're one of the few. But yeah, but we're not the only one. And there's conflicting information on the internet about how many episodes is appropriate and a feed and, you know, things like people sometimes say that Apple only displays the top 300 anyways on the Apple podcasts app.

But then when you subscribe, you can see them all. But I've looked at that before I changed it. I went to Apple and I'm like, nope, I can see everything back to number one. So I'm not really sure what the information, what information is accurate.

Or if this is even going to help, I hope it is. And we're going to find out. So listener, if you would like to help out, what would be wonderful is if you can email me talking dead podcast to gmail.com.

And let me know when you see the new episode appear because I'm going to know when it is released.

And it would be great to hear from various people around the world about when they first saw it appear in their podcast app. Now, if you can, it would very much help me if you could let me know in like Eastern North American time because that's where I am.

And if I don't know where you are, I'm not going to know if what the time zone difference is. So be as accurate as possible. If you can make note of when it appears and then convert that the Eastern time and let me know if you're not already in Eastern time. So that would be helpful.

And I'll just see what happens and see if people are reporting that it's slow or fast.

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