another.thingelstad.com
The home for Another Thing, a podcast by Jamie Thingelstad. Built with Eleventy and served from S3 + CloudFront (see AGENTS.md).
Adding a new episode
-
Put the MP3 in the audio bucket: npm run audio:put -- uploads/YYYY/another-thing-N.mp3 (the file is not committed). It prints audioBytes and audioSeconds for the frontmatter.
-
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
audioBytes: 13237856
audioSeconds: 635.352
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.
-
Optionally drop a transcript text file alongside the markdown (referenced by transcript: in the frontmatter). Paragraphs are separated by blank lines.
-
Commit and push. GitHub Actions builds and deploys to S3 + CloudFront.
Duration and file size come from audioBytes and audioSeconds, as audio:put prints them. 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 and the shared
type on the built pages, the type scale in main.css (nothing below 14px), and
whether the vendored src/_data/sites.json and src/assets/css/shared/ still
match ../shared/ (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 deploys.
- Markdown-per-episode, one file in
content/episodes/, with the audio's size and running time in its frontmatter (the MP3 lives in S3, not git). 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/.
- The 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.
- The shared type: Inter Tight headings and Inter text, self-hosted, on the blog's scale (19px body, nothing below 14px) and its 1120px frame.
src/assets/css/shared/ is a vendored copy of thingelstad.com/shared/tokens.css and its fonts, synced and checked with sites.json.
- 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.
- S3 + CloudFront (
infra/), with the episode audio in its own bucket at the same URLs. GitHub Pages served the site until 2026-10-26. 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 S3 + CloudFront (npm run deploy:aws).
