In this episode of Running in Production, Nick Janetakis goes over building a
podcast site with Jekyll and Ruby. It’s hosted on a single DigitalOcean server
and has been running in production since October 2019.

Nick talks about what it takes to release an episode, keeping things simple,
developing a custom audio player, hosting a bunch of sites on a single
DigitalOcean server with nginx, using shell scripts to help reduce human errors
and more.

Topics Include

• 2:06 – The podcast is not sponsored and it’s done in Nick’s spare time after hours


• 2:30 – What’s involved end to end to put together an episode


• 8:50 – Each episode gets about 400 downloads or listens but it’s hard to track


• 10:41 – Motivation for using Jekyll and Ruby


• 13:03 – A couple of custom Jekyll plugins to help building a podcast site


• 16:55 – So many static generators to choose from, just pick one


• 18:09 – Use the tools that you like and don’t constantly second guess yourself


• 19:34 – What is Liquid (Jekyll’s templating language)?


• 21:01 – The custom audio player is the only real amount of JavaScript on the site


• 25:42 – Jekyll-Assets is being used to MD5 tag static file names for cache busting


• 26:34 – nginx is serving the site with Let’s Encrypt handling the SSL certificates


• 28:12 – The only SAAS tool being used is Google Analytics but I don’t use it for much


• 29:20 – A few static sites are all hosted on a $5 / month DigitalOcean server


• 32:06 – The server load is at 2-3% CPU with 60,000+ monthly visitors


• 33:06 – Debian Bullseye is running on the server


• 34:38 – Ansible is used to provision the server


• 38:47 – Deploying a new podcast episode to the site


• 41:59 – Making sure all tags are properly filled out


• 43:46 – Another shell script to auto-inject an episode’s length and file size in bytes


• 46:55 – There’s no secret management because there’s no secrets


• 47:29 – The code is backed up on GitHub and an external USB HDD


• 49:54 – DigitalOcean’s built in monitoring and alerting as well as Uptime Robot is being used


• 52:34 – Best tips? Find tools that you’re genuinely happy using and stick with them


• 54:39 – You can find Nick on his site, @nickjanetakis on Twitter and nickjj on GitHub

Links

📄 References

• https://buildasaasappwithflask.com


• https://diveintodocker.com


• https://www.youtube.com/c/NickJanetakis


• https://www.audacityteam.org/


• https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve/


• https://github.com/nickjj/runninginproduction.com


• https://github.com/nickjj/runninginproduction.com/issues/1


• https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/displaying-database-results-across-multiple-columns-with-1-line-of-css


• https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/using-ffmpeg-to-get-an-mp3s-duration-and-4-ways-to-get-the-file-size


• https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/transform-a-toshiba-chromebook-cb35-into-a-linux-development-environment-with-galliumos

⚙️ Tech Stack

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