Got the need for feeds? Don’t let Big Tech come between you and your favorite podcasters. Launch your personal podcast player in minutes with open-source, forever-free web tech.

Pod Force is a podcast player web app template anyone can use to subscribe and listen to their favorite podcasts. Simply copy the template, add your subs, and publish! Jekyll builds a static site you can take anywhere, or host right here on GitHub Pages. No authoritarian app ecosystem — just you and your pods.

How it works

1. Add your podcast feed links to the subscriptions.yml data file.
2. Publish your site to GitHub Pages using the included Action workflow.
3. Listen to podcasts after your site is auto-magically updated daily!

How to use this template

Copying the template

1. Press the Use this template button on the Code tab.
2. Follow the instructions to name and save your repository.

Adding subscriptions

1. In the _data folder, update the subscriptions.yml file with the podcast feed links you want to subscribe to, following the format of the examples.
2. Commit the changes.

Turning on GitHub Pages

1. Go to Pages on the Settings tab.
2. In the Build and deployment section, set Source to GitHub Actions.

Updating your site with the latest episodes

Pod Force is set up to run on a schedule. You can also manually update and publish your site:

1. Go to the Actions tab.
2. Go to the Deploy Jekyll site to Pages workflow file.
3. Press the Run workflow button and give it a few minutes.

If you want to change the timing and/or frequency of the schedule:

1. Read up on the "cron" syntax.
2. Update the cron setting in this file: .github/workflows/publish.yml

Things to note

• It intentionally only imports and displays a limited amount of episodes.
• It uses browser localStorage to keep track of things like where you are in an episode and whether you've marked it as played. That means this data is specific to the device and browser you're using.
• For some reason, Firefox does better than Chrome at handling buffering and playing back audio when the phone screen is locked, so I use Firefox. Not sure about Safari.
• The use of "private feeds" (like Substack, for example, or other paid services) is not currently supported by the importer. But I plan on asking ChatGPT how to handle this.

License and credit

Pod Force is available for use and modification under the MIT license. It relies on the following open-source projects:

• Jekyll
• jekyll-import
• Pico CSS framework