Rebuild the Site

When I setup the original site, I didn’t think that the host I chose would be so restrictive. The templates and workflow I setup were fine. Visually fine. Grabbed the RSS material fine. But when I wanted to tweak things, I couldn’t get it to do what I wanted. The site builder tools were both too complicated and not permissive enough to do certain things I knew I had to get done for SEO and GEO to work better.

I couldn’t change the favicon easily (though I did figure that one out eventually). The share links were generic and wouldn’t reference a specific episode with images and descriptions. I couldn’t build a unique page for each episode or song we released.

So, it had to go.

I was already using Vercel for other things. I checked around to see what I could build easily and host on Vercel. All roads pointed to Astro. So, a quick tutorial with Astro and we’re off.

New features:

• Each episode has a unique page with the description, the episode artwork, and a full transcript
• Depending on the show, the transcript will have the correct speaker (Renee or Marc) though when I feed the audio through the transcription tools it doesn’t always get it 100%. But good enough
• New favicon
• New Share Link art and descriptions. Links will automatically pull the artwork for the episode if available…or the generic image for any of the main pages
• New “The Music” page for each of the unique songs that are released a day before the episodes
• More tech stuff…better SEO and GEO optimisations behind the scenes
• And more retro feel fonts and colours…I didn’t want to go full GeoCities with blinking and all that
• …and there’s a shop link to our Fourthwall store

Hope you enjoy the new look and feel and hopefully it made it easier for you to find the podcast. As always, share with your friends and family. Drop us a note if you have ideas for the show - nostalgicnerdspodcast@gmail.com