another.thingelstad.com

The home for Another Thing, a podcast by Jamie Thingelstad. Built with Eleventy and deployed to GitHub Pages.

Adding a new episode

1. Drop the MP3 into uploads/YYYY/.

2. Create one markdown file in content/episodes/, named like 00N-slug.md:

   ---
   title: How do you start a podcast?
   number: 1
   slug: how-do-you-start-a
   date: 2025-10-05T18:48:44-05:00
   audio: /uploads/2025/another-thing-1.mp3
   transcript: 001-how-do-you-start-a-podcast.txt
   summary: Stepping into podcasting and trying my hand at something new.
   guid: https://another.thingelstad.com/2025/10/05/how-do-you-start-a.html
   guidIsPermalink: true
   ---
   
   Show notes go here as normal markdown.

3. Optionally drop a transcript text file alongside the markdown (referenced by transcript: in the frontmatter). Paragraphs are separated by blank lines.

4. Commit and push. GitHub Actions builds and deploys to Pages.

Duration and file size are read from the MP3 automatically at build time. The episode's permalink is computed from the publish date and slug (/YYYY/MM/DD/slug.html); the guid frontmatter field locks the RSS GUID independently so subscriptions stay valid even if a slug is later edited.

librarian-thing imports these episode markdown/transcript files into data/podcast/another-thing/episodes/ for the Librarian podcast corpus. Another remains the publishing surface; the Librarian owns Thingy's searchable corpus.

Local development

Use Node 24.

npm install
npm run serve

Open http://localhost:8080.

Build

npm run build

Runs Eleventy, then builds the Pagefind search index over the output in _site/.

npm test

Runs the node --test suite: the docs check, the sites strip on the built pages, and whether the vendored src/_data/sites.json still matches ../shared/sites.json (skipped when that sibling folder is not checked out, as in CI).

Architecture

• Eleventy 3 with Nunjucks templates; ESM project ("type": "module").
• Node 24 for local builds and GitHub Pages deploys.
• Markdown-per-episode, one file in content/episodes/, with auto-derived audio metadata via music-metadata. No central JSON database.
• Transcripts inline on each episode page, below the show notes.
• Pagefind client-side search, indexed once per episode and reachable from /search/.
• Jamie's sites strip at the top of every page, the same strip as on Jamie's other sites. It renders at build time from src/_data/sites.json, a vendored copy of thingelstad.com/shared/sites.json: edit the shared file, then run npm run sites:sync (and npm run sites:check to confirm). The markup and colours are the shared contract in thingelstad.com/AGENTS.md.
• Tinylytics for privacy-friendly analytics, per-episode kudos buttons, visitor country flags, and a play-event custom event fired the first time each episode is played.
• GitHub Pages with custom domain via CNAME. Deploy workflow at .github/workflows/deploy.yml.

Feeds and machine-readable indexes

The site publishes the same content in several formats:

URL	Format	Purpose
/podcast.xml	RSS 2.0 + iTunes + Podcast Index	Podcast directories and apps
/feed.xml	RSS 2.0 + content:encoded	Plain feed readers
/index.json	JSON	Programmatic catalog of episodes
/llms.txt	Markdown	llms.txt index for LLMs
/YYYY/MM/DD/slug.txt	Markdown	Per-episode plain-text companion (show notes + full transcript)
/sitemap.xml	XML	Standard sitemap

Each new episode automatically appears in all of these on the next build.

URL preservation

The site replaces a previous micro.blog deployment at the same domain. The following URLs are preserved exactly to keep podcast directory subscriptions valid:

• /podcast.xml — canonical podcast RSS feed (Apple, Spotify, Overcast, etc. poll this URL)
• /YYYY/MM/DD/slug.html — episode permalinks and RSS <guid> values
• /uploads/YYYY/*.mp3 — episode audio enclosures
• /uploads/2025/another-thing-3000.png — channel cover art

Permalink shape and GUID handling live in lib/loadEpisodes.js.

Deploy

Pushes to main trigger .github/workflows/deploy.yml, which runs npm ci, npm test and npm run build and publishes _site/ to GitHub Pages. The custom domain is set via the CNAME file at the repo root.