Podcaster

eleventy-plugin-podcaster — or Podcaster, as we will call it from now on — is an Eleventy plugin that helps you create a podcast and a website to accompany it. You provide Podcaster with information about your podcast and its episodes, and it creates a feed for you to submit to podcast directories like Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And you can use all the information you have provided to create your site, with pages for individual episodes, guests, topics, seasons or anything else at all.

Plenty of services exist to host your podcast online — Spotify, Acast, Podbean, Buzzsprout, Blubrry. But none of these will allow you to own and control your podcast’s presence on the web, and none of them will give you the freedom to create a site that presents your podcast in a way that reflects its premise, tone and style.

But Eleventy and Podcaster will.

Usage

Specific information about how to install and use Podcaster can be found in the Documentation section of the site, but here’s a quick summary.

1. Install Podcaster

Podcaster is an Eleventy plugin. Create an Eleventy site and install the eleventy-plugin-podcaster plugin in the usual way. Podcaster requires Node 20 or later.

2. Provide information to the plugin

• In the data directory, create a podcast.json file. This will contain information about your podcast and its site — at the very least, its title, the site URL, a description, its language, and its category.

• In the input directory, create an episode-posts directory. This directory will contain a post for each episode, a post which includes information about the episode, including its title, date, episode number and show notes.

• Optionally, in the input directory, create an episode-files directory for your episode audio files.

3. Create the website pages

The posts you have created in the episode-posts directory will be turned into pages for the individual episodes. You can also create an index page or pages, which list and describe all the episodes. And you can create whatever other pages you like, including tag pages, topic pages, guestbooks and about pages.

4. Host the website

You can host a Podcaster site wherever you host an Eleventy site. But you will probably want to host your podcast episode files on an external CDN. Podcaster works well with a range of different setups.

Podcaster in action

I started podcasting and creating podcasting websites in 2014. At first I used Squarespace, then WordPress, and then Jekyll, before finally settling on Eleventy late in 2022.

I now have eight podcast websites built with Eleventy and Podcaster; Podcaster itself was derived from the code I originally used to create them.

Here’s the list:

• Flight Through Entirety, a Doctor Who podcast flying through the entirety of the show’s 60-something-year history.
• Untitled Star Trek Project, a Star Trek commentary podcast, where two friends watch Star Trek episodes from across the franchise, chosen (nearly) at random using a page on the podcast website.
• 500 Year Diary, another Doctor Who podcast, where we look at the show’s themes and ideas and some of the people involved in its creation.
• The Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire, a Doctor Who flashcast, where we give our initial reactions to each episode of the post-2023 era of the show.
• Startling Barbara Bain, a commentary podcast on Space: 1999, a lavish and generally ridiculous British scifi show from the 1970s.
• Maximum Power, a podcast about Blake’s 7, a less lavish but more ridiculous British scifi show from the 1970s.
• Bondfinger, a James Bond commentary podcast that soon ran out of James Bond films and ended up spending its time drinking and watching terrible TV shows from the 1960s.
• Jodie into Terror, our original Doctor Who flashcast, where we gave our initial reactions to each episode of Doctor Who’s Jodie Whittaker Era.

Licence

This plugin is available as open source under the terms of the ISC License.