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

1. 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.

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
   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.
   

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 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).