Podcaster

Hosting a podcast and creating its website with Eleventy.

Describing a podcast episode

Podcasts are an audio medium, of course, but your listeners’ podcast players describe each of your episodes using text — a title, a short description and a long description.

And so Podcaster lets you provide all three of those.

I’ve posted about titles already — so let’s talk about the short and long descriptions.

Short description

Podcaster lets you provide the short description for your episode in the front matter of that episode’s post as episode.description. This is plain text, and podcast players usually show it — or the start of it — in list views.

If you don’t provide episode.description, Podcaster will use the first 800 or so characters — about 150 words — of the long description instead.

Long description

Podcaster takes your episode’s long description from the content of the episode’s post. This is HTML, which means it can include styled text, headings and — most importantly — links, which are just the sort of things you need for an episode’s show notes.

Podcast players differ in how well they present these — but all of the common ones will at least show links and paragraphs correctly.

Customising these descriptions

If you want to customise how episode.description is calculated from the content of your post, or if you want to add additional information to your show notes, Podcaster lets you customise both of these descriptions.

If podcast.episodeDescriptionTemplate exists, it’s assumed to contain the name of a template in your includes directory; the same with podcast.episodeContentTemplate. If those templates exist, they are included in your podcast feed, specifying the short and long descriptions respectively.

Sample templates

Here’s a sample episode description template that reduces the length of the short description to 255 characters. Remember, the short description produced by this template needs to be plain text.

{{ post.content | safe | striptags(true) | truncate(255) }}

And here’s a sample episode content template based on the one from my Star Trek podcast site. It includes the stardate and first broadcast date of the Star Trek episode we discuss in a given podcast episode. The long description produced here is in HTML.

<p>
  <em>
    First broadcast on {{ post.data.starTrek.broadcast | readableDate }}.  
    Stardate: {{ post.data.starTrek.stardate }}.
  </em>
</p>
{{ post.content | safe }}

The episode description template and the episode content template both need to be Nunjucks templates, and both need to refer to the podcast episode’s post as post, using the collection item data structure.

Unnecessary technical detail

Podcaster includes the short description in the feed as the contents of the <itunes:summary> and <description> tags. It includes the long description in the feed as the content of the <content:encoded> tag, inside a CDATA section.