As of today at noon, I have made a change to my podcast feed that could have some hefty impact. Allow me to further explain.
When I first started out with my adventures into podcasting, I did my RSS feed[wiki] by hand. Well, not literally, but I wrote the code myself in the way that I have learned to do things most of my life. I surfed all over the web to find tutorials and hints, looked at the code of what other people were doing, and then applied that to my stuff until it worked. Doing all the audio was a piece of cake. This part, on the other hand, took some learning.
In the history of RadioZoom, there have been three different feed addresses, the one that I currently run through FeedBurner being the last[http://feeds.feedburner.com/radiozoom]. The first version was rough, to say the least. But was it Feed Validator compliant? Not at all. That brought on the second version, which brought it up to standards and changed the address slightly, but was still hand coded. FeedBurner was the end solution that took the blog feed for the podcast and turned it into something podcatchers could fully understand, all being done automatically.
I stopped doing all manual updates around sometime in early 2005. I sent out alerts to subscribers to those feeds around that time, feeling pretty good about the switch working out in the end. About the time that I moved to Vancouver, I noticed that I was still getting errors from some one or some thing trying to get to those feeds. I decided to try redirects, but heard from fellow podcasters that this solution was working for about half of the services people were using to subscribe to podcasts.