Yesterday I had a phone call with Doc Searls (about which he blogs) and while I was giving him some technical podcasting support, at one point we were talking about iTunes as a podcatcher. He was talking about not getting episodes that way for a long time, and I realized something simple. All this time I've been pissed off at Apple for screwing up the rollout, I had a stopgap available to me. I added an URL rewriting rule to my Apache setup and now any attempt to fetch the default (Bittorrent) feed by something with a User-Agent that begins with "iTunes" will get the MP3 feed instead. Completely fricking simple and suddenly, it should all work again for everyone, even the ones subscribed to the default feed.

It sucks that I have to do something kludgy like this, but at least folks will not find their subscription to my feed silently fail anymore.