Aaron Parecki

Seriously Simple Podcasting is a great Wordpress plugin for hosting your own podcast. However, the number of episodes it includes in the RSS feed is tied to the number of items you include in all your other RSS feeds as well. 

If you want your podcast listeners to be able to find old episodes, you'll need to make sure that all your podcasts appear in the feed all the time, since some clients like iTunes will treat your RSS feed as authoritative, and delete episodes from their directory when they disappear from the feed.

Tonight I took a plunge into the WordPress plugin to see why it was only including the last 10 posts. It turns out the plugin will actually show the number of posts of all your other RSS feeds, and also provides a hook to override that. Why they don't expose that in the interface I don't know.

So, rather than making all your RSS feeds show all of your posts (which will slow down your site and use a lot more of your server's bandwidth), I wrote a plugin that overrides the default setting!

Download this plugin to your plugins folder, and enable it in the WordPress panel! You can download the zip linked below, or just copy and paste this super tiny amount of code into a file in your plugins folder.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Include All Podcast Episodes in RSS Feed
Plugin URI: https://aaronparecki.com/ssp-include-all-episodes-in-rss-feed
Description: This plugin enables displaying all podcast episodes in the Seriously Simple Podcast feed
Version: 1.0
Author: Aaron Parecki
Author URI: https://aaronparecki.com
License: CC0
*/

add_filter('ssp_feed_number_of_posts', 'ssp_modify_number_of_posts_in_feed');

function ssp_modify_number_of_posts_in_feed( $n ) {
  return 10000;
}

Note that after you install the plugin, you'll have to change something about your podcast (upload a new episode, change the description of an episode, whatever) in order to get the plugin to regenerate the RSS feed since it seems to cache it.