posted by jessicaip on October 23, 2010 | 1 comments
Hi!

I was previously subscribed to Popup Chinese and had all 300ish of the old lessons in the archive. When I decided to sign up for an account on this site and found that I could customize my settings, I tried resubscribing to to PC in hopes that my podcast subscription would also be customized, but it wasn't. So I have two questions:

1) How/can I customize my itunes podcast settings so that I only receive beginners/intermediate lessons?

2) Since I resubscribed, I don't see all the previous lessons anymore. I only see 12 downloadable podcasts on itunes. What happened to all of them? I listen to the lessons on my iphone most of the time and since I'm new here, I'd love to go back and listen to all the previous lessons as well!

Thanks!

Jessica
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trevelyan on October 23, 2010 | reply
Hey Jessica,

Are you sure you're subscribed to your custom feed? Or did you figure things out after posting this comment, because I can see a LOT of lessons on your feed right here:

http://popupchinese.com/feeds/custom/jessicaip

The way things work is that if you change your level preferences on http://popupchinese.com/lessons ALL of the shows in the levels you've selected will get added to your RSS feed immediately. People used to have to add older shows manually.

We *have* made a couple of changes to our signup process to help people get everything working. The "add-all-lessons" feature is one of them. As part of this change, we've also limited the size of the RSS feed for non-paying users to the latest 15 items. Our goals here are twofold: (1) giving people an incentive to subscribe and (2) making sure that the feeds don't time-out when people open them in iTunes for the first time (which is a risk if someone subscribes to basically everything).

If anyone is in this situation and is frustrated by not being able to download everything, an easy workaround is just to delete lessons from your front page once iTunes has downloaded the lessons. You can do this by clicking on the "close" box in the lesson teaser. The feeds will update instantly and you should be able to grab the next 15 lessons.

Feedback is appreciated as always -- and we can push up the limit if this is being a real inconvenience to people. I'm hoping to get a introductory podcast up that will explain all of this stuff in the next week or so. Right now Popup Chinese is a bit of a sink-or-swim experience for a lot of people.

Best,

--david