ButterBox Content Pack Sample Podcast

A small, self-contained sample podcast webpage and RSS feed from Guardian Project. This repository is intended as an example "content pack": a minimal, portable bundle of everything needed to host and distribute a podcast, including episode audio, show notes, a landing page, and a standards-compliant feed.

What's inside

• index.html : A simple, styled landing page that lists each episode with inline audio playback.
• podcast.xml : An RSS 2.0 feed with iTunes podcast extensions, suitable for submission to podcast directories and use in podcast players.
• posts/*.md : Per-episode show notes in Markdown (YAML frontmatter holds the episode metadata).
• posts/*.mp3 : The episode audio files, colocated with their show notes.
• build.sh : Regenerates index.html and podcast.xml from the contents of posts/.

Using it

Because everything in index.html is relative-linked, you can serve this site from a folder on a USB drive plugged into a ButterBox device.

To subscribe in a podcast client, point it at the hosted URL of podcast.xml.

Building index.html and podcast.xml

Both output files are generated from the markdown posts in posts/ by build.sh. Run the script any time you add, remove, or edit a post:

./build.sh <baseURL>

The single required argument is the absolute URL prefix where the mp3 files will be served. It is only used for the <enclosure url="..."> entries in podcast.xml, because RSS enclosures must be absolute URLs so podcast clients can download them without knowing where the feed lives. Everything else in the generated files (the RSS <link>, the <audio> players in index.html, and the link to the feed itself) stays relative, so you can still move the whole bundle around and serve it from any path.

Example

If the files will be served from a USB drive called usb-butter plugged into a ButterBox, inside a folder named engardepodcast, run:

./build.sh http://butterbox.local/serve_file/media/usb-butter/engardepodcast/

Note that butterbox.local in the URL must match the configured hostname of your ButterBox. butterbox.local is the default, but if you have changed yours to, for example, someotherbox.local, use that hostname instead.

The script will produce podcast.xml with enclosures like:

http://butterbox.local/serve_file/media/usb-butter/engardepodcast/posts/ProofModeCaravan-English-Feb2024.mp3

and an index.html whose audio elements still use the relative posts/<file>.mp3 path.

How it works

For each posts/*.md file (sorted newest-first by filename date prefix), the script:

1. Parses the YAML frontmatter (title, date, description, file, voices, keywords, duration/length, explicit).
2. Looks up the referenced mp3 in posts/ and reads its real byte size with stat for the RSS length attribute.
3. Picks whichever of the duration/length frontmatter fields actually looks like HH:MM[:SS] for <itunes:duration> (the two fields are used inconsistently across the sample posts).
4. Normalizes the date field into an RFC 822 <pubDate>.
5. Emits one <item> block into podcast.xml and one <article class="episode"> block into index.html.

Adding a new episode is just a matter of dropping a new YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md file and its .mp3 into posts/ and re-running build.sh.

License

All content in this repository (audio, show notes, webpage, and feed) is released under Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0). You may copy, modify, distribute, and use the material for any purpose, including commercial, without asking permission.