Hosting a podcast for pennies a day
I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2, so here’s how I migrated the sites to Hugo and maintain them for about $12/yr (not including the cost of the domains).
I chose Hugo because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators; there’s an 11ty plugin out there too which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself with minor knowledge of how to make a website. It’s simple and it works and it probably will not need any fiddling with unless I intentionally decide to change some part of how it works. That said, if you have suggestions on how to improve or streamline this, shoot me an email! I’m sharing not because this is a perfect, optimized workflow but because I hope it might help someone.
Setting up a podcast feed in Hugo
At its core, a podcast is just audio files served by an RSS feed. Hugo already has an embedded RSS template that it uses to syndicate your content.3 It’s a good base to start from; we’re basically going to use that and inject in the basic podcast tags as well as some additional ones for newer features like chapter support.
First, create a new file at layouts/index.podcast.xml
. Then, add the following to your Hugo config file (I use toml
format, which I believe is the Hugo default).
[outputs]
home = ["HTML", "RSS", "podcast" ] # Sets up podcast feed
[outputFormats]
[outputFormats.podcast]
MediaType = "application/rss+xml"
BaseName = "feed" # Your feed will be located at example.org/feed.xml. If you edit this value, you need to edit line 43 in layouts/index.podcast.xml.
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I think about bringing Pitch & Play back sometimes because I truly do miss podcasting and I like talking about games. I walked away from the Harry Potter one for obvious reasons, and the one before that I won’t mention because episodes of it still exist online (outside of my control) and I’d rather not attach myself to them. ↩︎
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WordPress is a bloated monster that constantly has security patches and the founder is super problematic. ↩︎
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This template has been updated since I set up my feeds; I’m sticking with the old version. ↩︎