Podcaster

Hosting a podcast and creating its website with Eleventy.

Three titles

---
title: Entering a new phase
episode:
  title: S1E1, Entering a new phase (The Power of the Daleks)
  itunesTitle: Entering a new phase (The Power of the Daleks)
---

If you’ve read the documentation page about how to provide episode information to Podcaster, you might have noticed that Podcaster offers three different titles that you could provide for a given podcast episode.

Here’s how the docs describe them:

field value
title The title of the post on the website; by default, this will also be the title of the podcast episode.
episode.title The title of the episode if it’s different from the title of the post, above. If omitted, title is used instead.
episode.itunesTitle A specific episode title for use in Apple Podcasts only. (Apple Podcasts doesn’t allow episode numbers in titles, so if you want to include episode numbers elsewhere, you need to specify a separate episode title for Apple Podcasts.) (New in version 1.1.0)

Most of the time, the first title will be enough on its own. But here’s an explanation of why you might provide the other two.

episode.title

Some podcasts give each episode a title that is a funny or striking quotation from the episode. Others use a title that specifies the episode’s main topic. But what if you want to do both?

Our podcast Flight Through Entirety uses quotations as titles, because that’s fun, but it’s helpful for listeners to know what Doctor Who story is the topic of a given episode. And so we use title for the quotation, while episode.title consists of the quotation followed by the topic. Like this:

---
title: Plummeting Towards Sheffield
topic: Twice upon a Time
episode: 
  title: Plummeting Towards Sheffield (Twice upon a Time)
---

And so the post on the site will have the title Plummeting Towards Sheffield, but in the feed and in your podcast player of choice, the episode title will be Plummeting Towards Sheffield (Twice upon a Time).

Tip

You could use a directory data file and the eleventyComputed property to automatically calculate episode.title from title and topic.

{
  "eleventyComputed": {
    "episode.title": "{{ title }} ({{ topic }})"
  }
}

Note

Some podcatchers, like Apple Podcasts and Pocket Casts, don’t actually show the part of the title in parentheses, even though it’s there in the feed. Overcast and Castbox do show the entire title.

episode.itunesTitle

Some podcasts include the episode number in their episode titles, but Apple Podcasts doesn’t want you to do that. And so you can provide a separate Apple Podcasts–only title as episode.itunesTitle.

---
title: Plummeting Towards Sheffield
episode:
  episodeNumber: 296
  title: "296: Plummeting Towards Sheffield"
  itunesTitle: Plummeting Towards Sheffield
---

(The Accidental Tech Podcast feed and the feeds on Relay provide separate Apple Podcasts titles to their episodes for precisely this reason.)

Tip

Again, this is also the sort of thing you could use eleventyComputed to calculate.

{
  "eleventyComputed": {
    "episode.title": "{{ episode.episodeNumber }}: {{ title }}",
    "episode.itunesTitle": "{{ title }}"
  }
}