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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

I didn't much love hosting on Anchor/Spotify, but I made this in half an hour and I didn't want to have to get into RSS/site generation. Do you know of an easy way to dump audio files and some metadata somewhere and get a Podcast with RSS? I can upload there as well.

I'll try Polly, thanks! The current voice annoys me too.

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The main problem is giving out the anchor.fm domain for your RSS feed, as it marries you to Anchor forever. In theory, you can get anchor to 301 redirect your subscribers somewhere else, but I've found that podcast clients tend to keep the old URL.

You can use Anchor to generate your RSS feed and host your content while still sharing the RSS URL on a domain you own. So you'd give out a URL like feeds.deepdreams.com/rss, and it would proxy the response from Anchor's RSS feed

I wrote a simple Go cloud function that can proxy your Anchor RSS URL for you:

https://github.com/mtlynch/rss-proxy

Hm, yeah, I should at least whip up something like that. Getting the domain is easy, I just don't want to have to set up another static site or service just to proxy a file... Maybe I should bite the bullet and set up GitLab pages plus a simple script to output an RSS feed.

I ended up setting GitLab pages to just curl the XML feed every time I publish, so now it's at https://deepdreams.stavros.io/feed.xml. Thanks for the help!

Nice! Glad it was helpful.

It's one of those things that's hard to do after you've got a bunch of subscribers, so I'm always glad if I can warn people early in their podcast against getting stuck with their host.

Oh definitely agreed, I aim to always own my stuff, but this was so quick and dirty that I figured it doesn't matter enough. Still, since it was this easy to do, better safe than sorry!

BTW you might want to ask dang to change the link in the submission too!

The link should be okay, I don't have another website, just the feed is hosted elsewhere (and it's linked in the target page).

Just listened to one of the episodes. Sounds decent. I personally think it would sound a lot better if you slowed down the speed a little bit. 0.75x sounded much better to me.

It depends on which one you heard, there are 3 different voices there.

I have rehosted!:

https://deepdreams.stavros.io/

dang, if you see this, could you repoint the URL to the article? Thanks!

Polly supports ssml tags for nuanced vocal inflection and emphasis. Gpt-3 could probably output high quality tags if you run your content back through with an ssml prompt.

Hmm, I'll try that, thank you! Very interesting idea.

You seriously made all this in half an hour?

Well, it might have taken 45'. It's all auto-generated, it was really quick.

I wrote a script later to automate the audio mixing, that took another hour. Now I can generate a ready-to-upload episode with one command, though.

I think most people here would be interested in a write-up.

Oh, good idea. I'll do that!

I've worked with Stavros a lot over the past decade. Half an hour is totally plausible...

I didn’t check OP’s username so your comment made me wonder what an amazing technology platform is Stavros!

I have wondered the same thing myself in the past.

Off-topic: Speaking of the OP's username, it seems he originally used to go by StavrosK [1] on HN for several years, right?

I initially didn't recognize the username because it was all-lowercase, so I'm curious why the rename from StavrosK to stavros?

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stavrosk

By the power of glue code, I manifest products.

You could use Transistor [0].

[0]: https://transistor.fm/

GitHub pages might work for you.

E.g., https://github.com/wiobyrne/infusing-computing-pod

Hmm, the static site will take a bit of setting up, but I'll look into it. Thank you.

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