This site is built using the static site generator Jekyll, the audio files live on Amazon S3 and (for the time being) the site itself is hosted on GitHub pages.

This approach was originally created and shared by the LinkRot podcast

Why?

The simple answer is that podcasting relies on a pretty simple technology - RSS. RSS often gets generated for a website almost as a by-product of adding content, this allows people to “subscribe” to your website and be notified or fed updates. Jekyll generates RSS straight out of the box and every podcast needs a website so we thought - why not kill two birds with one stone?

Our Process

1. Record the conversation

2. Edit and export podcast

3. Edit metadata

4. FTP file to cloud storage - copy link

5. Create a new post in Markdown and add in the relevant front matter to the YAML section

layout: post
title: "Title Goes Here"
date: Publishing date and time
file: link to file in S3
summary: "Quick exerpt of episode"
description: "Longer information"
duration: "how long in minutes and seconds" 
length: "in seconds"
explicit: "do we swear" 
keywords: "keyword tags"
block: "hold back publishing it" 
voices: "who did the talking"

6. Add links and show notes to the content section.

7. Once we’re complete Commit to GitHub

8. Site and RSS is updated and the new episode is pushed out

Can I haz?

The beauty of this set up is that it’s simple - and you can access all the source files over on GitHub. The RSS file pulls information from the config.yml file which has most of the information you need to publish on iTunes. The episode information and file for Plyr are included the Post layout and pulled in from the front matter listed above. All styles can be configured using some basic CSS.

Cheers!