Andrew Roach
I'm moving forward on my podcast hosting project, slowly.
I'm threw away the wire frames I had scratched together because they were focusing on all the wrong parts, and I'm working on a clearer design doc.
I'm still trying to decide if I'm going to pay someone to build it, or build it myself.
Andrew Roach
There was a point in my life where I had the skills to build this myself, but I'm fairly certain that point has passed, and that it would take me several hours of doing things very badly before I could do the things well again.
I'm not sure if I have the time for that, and I'd rather have the thing be well built, you know?
On the other hand, I'm doing this thing out of pocket, and I don't know if it'll ever turn a profit. I don't have thousands to spend on getting it running.
Andrew Roach
I'm getting ahead of myself.
What am I talking about?
I want to build a podcast hosting service.
Folks who make podcasts create an account, and upload their podcast episodes. We generate a website for them, with a home page, an about page, and a page for each episode. We also generate their podcast RSS/ATOM feeds.
They can choose between many available templates. I'll write the templates myself. I'll write the body copy, and handle most of the styling too.
Andrew Roach
We'll have two tiers:
- Free tier with limited storage/bandwidth and no custom domain
- Paid tier with unlimited storage/bandwidth and custom domain
We'll have a small number of pages:
- Front Page/landing page
- Description of the service
- Pricing info
- Get started guide
- Show Page
- Chronological/timeline display of episodes
- Episode Page
- About page
- [Popular/featured] page
- Shows the name, description, most recent episode, and artwork for our featured podcasts
Andrew Roach
Users can log in. Once logged in, they can see the shows they control/are members of.
Within each show, they can:
- Pick a theme
- Pick a color scheme
- Upload show art
- Edit the description
- Edit the notes for existing episodes
- Upload new episodes.
In an ideal world, shows can belong to more than one user, users can have more than one show. That first point is not essential, but the second one very much is.
That's it. It's dead simple.
Andrew Roach
From a back-end/infrastructure perspective:
- The home page, show pages, episodes, etc are all static pages, built with Jekyll or similar.
- The admin users pages will be dynamic, and probably written in php.
The way I see it, each show is a folder, each episode is a text file and a media file. The text files will get some YAML at the top, and we'll have a few themes available.
Andrew Roach
There are a few things I'm uncertain about.
1) How do I handle payments? Paypal and google checkout were the only options when I was doing dev regularly.
2) Can I set up jekyll or another SSG to automatically rebuild *just the files that have changed* any time a file changes?
Andrew Roach
3) eventually, I'll want a system where new episodes are stored locally as long as there is local free space (local storage is more expensive, but local transfer is cheaper) and periodically, older/less frequently accessed episodes are moved to s3 to keep local storage available
Andrew Roach
I'm not sure how to do the S3 stuff, at all. I've only ever worked with s3 via tntdrive..
I'm not sure how to only turn on premium features for paid users. (I mean, I assume I'm going to have to hook in to an API to verify if the payment goes through each month, but I've never had to do this automatically)
I don't currently know enough about Jekyll or any other SSG to know if any of them can do what I want out of the box, or if I'm going to have to hack that behavior together in bash.
Andrew Roach
Beyond those three (honestly fairly small) concerns, I feel like this is a straightforward project.
I don't need anything fancy on the front end. This is supposed to be a bare bones system. I'm very comfortable with CSS, and I'll make it look exactly how I want it to.
I don't need any hand holding on the back-end. I'm a sysadmin, and I'm not bad at it.
Andrew Roach
The s3 stuff doesn't have to be working out of the box, and doesn't have to handled on the application level (other than, of course, the RSS feeds and show pages pointing to the right file, but even that can probably be handled on an infrastructure level.)
Andrew Roach
So, we ignore S3 at first, and I'm pretty sure Jekyll can do what I want.
That leaves payment processing/user access control as hurdle #1, a super basic UI for editing markdown files, and a way to manage themes.
From a Minimum Viable perspective, I feel like this could be done quickly and simply.
What am I missing? Surely something.
Andrew Roach
I guess that leaves me at:
Does this sound like something that you'd be interested in building for/with me? Do you know someone that would? What would you charge for a project like this? Do you have any questions?
Andrew Roach
Oh! I did forget something.
I have no idea how to handle custom domains.
I imagine that I would need them to point their domain at my server's IP, and then do some apache config stuff.
I've done multiple domains on one server before. I've never done User Configurable multidomain.
But it's all config files, as long as we're sanitizing our inputs, I don't see it being a real problem.
Andrew Roach
Basically, though, this is the thing that I want to be doing.
If someone else wants to build it, and let me pay them for it, I'd be down for that.
If you want to build it, and hire me to do support and systems administration, I'd probably be okay with that too.
I want to spend the rest of my life helping people make and share their media. If I can pull this off, and it actually makes a little money, then I could *just* do DIY media, instead of it being the thing I *also* do.
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