How long can a feed be? How much history should a podcast feed contain?

Is FeedBurner the only service that limits feeds to 512k, and if so, why? I have seen LibSyn hosted shows with over 200 shows in the feed, going all the way back to their first show. Yet FB tells me that my source feed for this show is too large, and that I need to cut it back.

I want to know why. How do I keep my current listeners happy, providing them with new content, while still maintaining a feed that contains all of the shows back to #1, because that’s something that listeners who are new to the show had requested, numerous times in the past: the ability to have ALL of the shows in the feed, so that iTunes would keep them all organized from beginning to end (because iTunes has STILL not given us a way to add manually downloaded podcasts to the show catalog it belongs to).

I am going to tweak FeedBurner to give it enough space to include the latest two shows. But be forewarned, it’s very likely that I will not be using FeedBurner as a feed for this show anymore.

If you want to avoid the confusion later, please resubscribe using http://www.babylonpodcast.com/category/shows/feed/ at your earliest convenience. This is the feed that iTunes should also be using for the one-click subscriptions, so those folks should be just fine.

If you manually subscribed using either http://feeds.feedburner.com/babylonpodcast or the old, defunct feed of http://www.babylonpodcast.com/shows/feed/, please update your podcatchers as soon as possible.