How to build a podcast website or blog

#podcast #devops

With 13 years in professional programming I've already seen a lot of failed hypes & undelivered promises. It's rare to see an innovation that actually tackles more issues then it's introducing. One of those rare occasions seems to be developing right now - the move towards JAM stack - which is an umbrella term for many technologies, that used together creates a different approach to put content online.

If I were to build a blog, or podcast website I would go with following technologies:

github or gitlab for hosting the repository
netlify for hosting the website itself, and building the code
next.js or other JAM stack framework to build my code upon
some git-based cms, if we want to have more content-author friendly access

There are several advantages of approach this problem this way:

both git hosting can be used for free for both public & private repos
netlify has reasonable free tier - it comes with 300 build minutes (about 75 & 100 build) per month; adding a custom domain is very easy & cost below 20$ per year. They only register .com domains for you, for any other you have to go through other provider
next.js/JAM stack/static site generators provides really fast user experience with DevOps way simpler then you could dream with any other cms or blogging platform. Don't let the 'static site' fool you - it can be as dynamic as any other configuration - it's just the matter of correct set up & maybe embedding some 3rd party integrations.
git-based cms will integrate both sources of changes on the website - content & code - into one flow. With the correct set up, your content authors should be a confident use it as they would be with wordpress.

I think, even though that is very workflow based on some very technical tools, it could be prepared to be approachable for non-technical creators. So for example, you get your set up by following some tutorial & then jump straight into creating your content - in a quick & dirty aproach. And, when you will be ready to upgrade your page, you just get some designer/IT person to the project & they update the page without touching the basic set up.

Let me know in the comments below if you were interested in such a guide - I'm curious to investigate it myself, and if others are interested I can try sharing it here too.