Tag Archives: Community

How to turn a Podcast RSS feed into a website

As I wrote previously, getting started with a Podcast can be very straight forward. Todd and I wanted to add some personality to our show’s online presence, so we decided we needed a website. A lot of the information that would normally go on the website is already available in the Podcast’s RSS feed, so I started thinking about a way of not duplicating this effort. The Keep In Touch show is a hobby, and given how busy (and lazy) I am at the moment, I needed a pragmatic solution.

TL;DR

KeepInTouch.fm runs on Jekyll and is updated every time we publish an episode using our fork of the Jekyll RSS importer. We upload the episode and its metadata to our Podcast host and then we point the importer at the Podcast RSS feed. If needed, we customise the blog post and then push it to GitHub. GitHub pages then automatically updates the website.

List of requirements

We wanted the website to provide some fairly basic functionality:
– general information about the show, and a the ability to subscribe to the Podcast
– a blog/website where each episode can have its own page
– each episode page would need to privide visitors with the ability to listen to the show, and to find shownotes, links, and other relevant information

As the administrators of the website, we would need:
– a modern website: responsive, fast, and secure
– an easy to maintain set up (i.e. no hardware / software maintenance)
– a simple updating mechanism
– a simple way of transforming the information we had already provided in the Podcast’s RSS feed

The solution

GitHub Pages was the first option we considered, and luckily it ticked all our boxes. We quickly set up an organisation and picked a simple, but quite configurable jekyll theme for the site.

The only friction I still had to deal with was the “transformation” of the Podcast RSS feed into blog posts on the site. Jekyll does come with an RSS importer, so I gave that a go. Most of the metadata was extracted nicely, but there was no way to play the show without changing the post manually to link to the mp3 file that was actually available in the RSS feed.

Open Source FTW

Luckily, the Jekyll project is open source, which meant I was able to fork the RSS importer, and turn the RSS audio enclosure into an HTML audio tag. All it took was 13 lines of code.

The result

Today, my workflow couldn’t be (?) simpler:
– Record and edit the show
– Upload the episode and it’s metadata (i.e. shownotes) to the podcast host
– Run a simple script to fetch the new episode (and turn it from a feed Item into a blog Post)
– Push the new post to GitHub

If you found this post useful, please consider subscribing to KeepInTouch on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or wherever else you listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. Lastly, please send us your feebdack via email or twitter @KeepInTouchFM.

A Recommendation for the Air New Zealand Customer Carbon Offsetting Programme

Air New Zealand has a Carbon Offset programme and that’s a really good thing. I wish it was more attractive to flyers, though. If you don’t normally offset your flight’s carbon footprint, I’m curious to hear if the changes I propose below would make you more interested in participating in this programme.

At KiwiFoo this year I spoke to a few smart people and asked them if they offset their carbon footprint when flying Air NZ. People looked away, shrugged, and shook their heads. When asked why, their answers were a variation around the same theme: it felt futile, and a bit of a waste of time and money.

The rest of this blog post details how I believe this programme can be rejuvenated. I believe more people would participate in the programme if they felt appreciated and rewarded.

Real benefits

People are asked to spend money in order to offset their flights. There is even a calculator for that.

The offset cost for a return flight from Wellington to Auckland, as far as I know, can be as low as $2.49.

Wellington to Auckland Carbon Offset Cost $2.49 In return for that, what you get is just a good feeling. And that should be enough. But it’s not in our human nature for an anonymous good gesture like that to become the norm. What humans need is rewards, or, as we like to call it nowadays, a strong value proposition.

What if, upon paying to offset the carbon emissions, flyers get the following in return:

  1. A bag tag (or an insert in the vein of the orange priority tag that Star Alliance Gold members receive) that makes the bag stand out. How about a Pohutukawa insert that flyers can pick up somewhere near the check-in machines? This would be very similar to how Electric Vehicles often carry a blue badge.
  2. Luggage priority (value!). That would require the creation of a middle tier in luggage processing. Orange priority tags > Pohutukawa tags > Regular.
  3. Upweight for OneUp.  Currently, these are the upweight tiers: Elite – 50%, Gold – 30%, Silver – 10%. What if Pohutukawa was 5%?
  4. A creative, community designed, visual representation of the flyer’s aggregate contribution on the Air New Zealand website and apps.

Peer pressure

When other travellers see repeatedly the Pohutukawa Bag Tag insert, they may become curious with regards to what it represents. They may even learn more about the programme, and they may be encouraged to try it.

For each flight, let all the flyers see how much of the carbon footprint has been offset. Visually, that could be as simple as colouring in an Air NZ plane. Better still, maybe there is a way to produce a heat-map of the plane showcasing where the carbon offset spending occurred.

When there is a positive offset (ie. more carbon was offset than produced), then maybe there can be a new form of reward for the fliers who contributed (e.g. discount on the carbon offset cost of their next flight).

Closing notes

I’m secretly hoping somebody from Air New Zealand comes across this blog post and it inspires them to look at the Carbon Offset Programme once again. Is it producing the results that they were hoping it would? Are there ways to make it more attractive to flyers and to encourage them to contribute? I am a Star Alliance Gold member, I fly a lot more than I’d like to, and I often forget that this programme exists.