With my podcasting partner Jordan Rhea (rheajt on Github), I developed a site for our podcast, the Canadian Border Patrol.

While I had used React before, this was my first experience using Gatsby (or any SSG actually). I took on 2 main parts of the project:

1. UI design
2. RSS feed configuration For the UI design, I researched the possible styling options (of which there are many), tested a few, and eventually settled on the Rebass framework. Rebass was able to make much of the responsive design easier, and I could fall back on styled-components for more control. RSS feed configuration proved difficult due to confusing documentation and differences between podcast services. The documentation was not fully clear on how to add and format iTunes namespace tags, so a lot of trial and error was needed. On the podcast services side, I discovered that they are notoriously inconsistent with accepted HTML formatting in show notes. I decided on sending a very plain text excerpt per episode and having detailed show notes be limited to the site itself, and formatted my episode Markdown files accordingly.

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Update: I did some more RSS configuration to match iTunes new requirements for podcast episode numbers.