eleventy-plugin-podcaster — or Podcaster, as we will call it from now on — is an Eleventy plugin which lets you create a podcast and its accompanying website. Podcaster creates the podcast feed that you submit to Apple Podcasts, Spotify or any other podcast directory. And it provides information about your podcast to your Eleventy templates. This means that you can include information about the podcast and its episodes on your podcast’s website, creating pages for individual episodes, guests, topics, seasons or anything else at all.
Plenty of services exist that will host your podcast online — Spotify, Acast, Podbean, Buzzsprout, Blubrry. But none of these will allow you to own 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 Podcaster will.
Usage
Detailed and 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.
Podcaster is an Eleventy plugin. You install it in your config file in the usual way. You usually provide it with information about your podcast — like its title, description and category — by creating a podcast.json file in the data directory. For each episode, you create a template with information in the front matter about that episode — its name, release date, filename, duration and so on.
Once you do this, Podcaster can create the RSS feed for your podcast. You can also create templates for various pages on your website and include on those pages the information you have provided about the podcast and its episodes.
Warning
Podcaster requires Node 20 or later.
On this site
This site hosts the Podcaster documentation. But it also hosts the Podcaster blog, where I’ll be posting tips and ideas about how you can use Podcaster and Eleventy to create an online presence for your podcast.
Recently on the blog
Creating a home page
Monday 6 January 2025
You can put whatever you want on your podcast site’s home page, but the most obvious and straightforward approach might be to present a list of episodes in reverse chronological order.
Here’s how to do that.