After some tinkering with templates and reading up on iTunes’ feed formatting requirements… The old archives for https://insertcontenthere.com are back up! Built on @eleven_ty, with @otter_ai powered transcripts coming shortly.
Using @Netlify rather than @GithubPages let me use some of the fancy metadata tools in 11ty, and install a few markdown-it plugins to handle definition lists and transcript markup.
Dropped the episodes into an S3 bucket — long term it might be possible to automatically get filesize and audio duration automatically, but for the moment they just go into the frontmatter of each episode’s markdown file.
Most of the troubleshooting time was spent making a Nunjucks template for the podcast feed that didn’t require lots of special casing — now I can drop it into any other 11ty sites to expose a clean feed with minimal hassle.
11ty’s data cascade makes that a lot simpler — you can create a folder full of episodes… and supply a single fallback file that handles any metadata not supplied by an individual episode. Handy!
It’s not complete yet, but https://insertcontenthere.com/episode-11/ feels like a great example — Otter transcripts still take a fair bit of finessing, and I exposed the “raw” version on that episode, but it’s exciting to start making it more accessible.
Some things I ran into: complicated front matter cascades don’t always play nicely with @NetlifyCMS, so I have some troubleshooting to do. Making one source file generate two output files in @eleven_ty seems tricky as well…
That’s not essential, but it would make building audiogram episode previews with Twitter player cards, a lot simpler. Further tinkering to come!