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Podcast-on-Publii.md

I don't think you could automate the RSS as soon as you upload to a separate hosting service, because Publii works locally and requires you to manually publish your updated site to update your RSS. That said, you might be able to create a post for each episode, and include all the necessary podcast episode metadata (link to audio URL, link to cover, etc.). Then, when you update your website and publish it, it would update the RSS.

Haven't tested this though, so not sure how this would work in practice. My hunch is that you'll likely need to read up on what's needed for a podcast RSS, consult and edit the RSS handlebars file (see related forum post on overriding the default RSS feed layout), and create Post options with the Post Config options for any missing RSS specs.

I read something about an enclosure element as being a place where you could potentially include an audio file URL.

Here are some examples of RSS feed guidelines needed for different distributors (note that Publii may not include all of these in the default RSS):

Sidenote: Any reason why you're leaning towards setting up your podcast on Publii vs using a free service like Anchor.fm (now Spotify for Podcasters), Acast, Redcircle etc.? All of your listening stats would be aggregated in one place, but there are, of course, tradeoffs. Here are some discussions on this that I've come across:

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candidexmedia commented Jul 25, 2023 •
edited

Audio Players

Shikwasa

In terms of audio players: Shikwasa is a pretty solid looking audio player for podcasts:

Source code: https://github.com/jessuni/shikwasa
Demo: https://shikwasa.js.org/

Downside: It won’t be able to create a live, up-to-date playlist of all your episodes (at least not yet).

Castbox

For an embedded playlist with all episodes: the only other way I could think of would be to embed iframes for websites that fetch external feeds or host podcasts. Based on this list, it looks like Castbox might be a good option for an embeddable player that updates based on the feed.

(reply to Recommendations for podcast)

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candidexmedia commented Dec 25, 2023 •
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Analytics

OP3

➡️ Open Podcast Prefix Project (OP3) seems to be the most promising for aggregated data. It's a free and open-source podcast prefix analytics service committed to open data and listener privacy.

RSS specs: https://github.com/Podcastindex-org/podcast-namespace/blob/main/docs/1.0.md

Example analytics page, open to all:

May not work with Spotify, since it looks like Spotify caches the file after first download

Challenges

There’s no “subscriber api” for most listening apps, which makes subscriber counts difficult to measure. (As far as I know, Spotify is the only platform that has an analytics API, and they don't provide subscriber numbers through the API).

So getting your exact subscriber numbers will require you to log in to all the different dashboards. Generally, there are 5 places to get podcast analytics:

  • Your podcast hosting platform: some hosting platforms (like Transistor and Omny) will provide estimated subscriber numbers.
  • Apple Podcasts Connect: Apple provides additional data on folks listening to your podcast using their podcast app. You can access these by logging into Podcasts Connect.
  • Spotify for Podcasters: Spotify's dashboard will give you demographic information on your listeners: age, gender, plus all your streams.
  • Google Podcasts: you can get additional data on your podcast's performance on Google's Podcast Manager.
  • Chartable (IAB certified): Chartable provides a breakdown of Apple, Spotify, plus global charts by country.

Source

Other sources of analytics for self-hosted RSS:

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Audio Storage and Streaming

Backblaze B2 + Cloudflare

Use Backblaze with Cloudflare to save on bandwidth: Deliver Public Backblaze B2 Content Through Cloudflare CDN (step-by-step)

The partnership between Backblaze and Cloudflare means that you can store content with Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage and serve it to users using Cloudflare's CDN (Content Delivery Network) with no download fees from Backblaze. This means that content can be stored in Backblaze B2 while being delivered with the high speed and low latency of one of the world's premier CDNs. Users access your site with the same URLs as before, but now they enjoy the speed and reliability of Cloudflare. As a webmaster, you can also use Cloudflare features like Edge cache expire TTL.

-- Source

In a sense, you can stream as big of a file as you want, as long as it's loaded from a URL that is reverse-proxied by CloudFlare, who then retrieves directly from BackBlaze through a very fast connection.

-- Source

Examples of people using Backblaze

Archive.org

Downsides: (source)

  • Monitor links (make sure to use permalinks)
  • Scheduled maintenance = pod unavailable

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