What if your podcast is native on Ghost?

Using Ghost
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I’ve been thinking about podcasting, ownership, and how Ghost fits into all of it.

Ghost is great. It’s modern and fast. But if you’re running a podcast, you’re probably still piecing together a bunch of embeds to get your show online… the usual mess.

It kinda sucks that even with all this tech, podcasters still get pushed onto platforms that take a cut or control your feed. We need something different.

I’m messing around with ideas that could make that a thing. Not ready to share yet — but if you’re podcasting on Ghost (or thinking about it), I’d love to hear how you’re handling all this.

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So unless your podcast files are huge (or your host has your file upload size throttled way down), it actually is possible to host a podcast on Ghost. Put it in an audio card, add some custom code to make an RSS feed, and you can get it picked up by the podcast providers.

You can see that in action over at The foxwizard podcast

What’s not supported natively there is having a subscribers-only feed. You can restrict your podcasts to only being shown to subscribers, but there’s not a way to have the podcast providers pick the episodes up by rss that way. That’s where you’d really need an integration of some kind. Here’s a link to one option: Private, fulltext RSS feeds for Paid Members

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I see that foxwizard get the length of the mp3 file displayed. How do they do that?

<enclosure url="https://www.foxwizard.com/content/media/2025/12/e22_fw.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" length="42832266"/>

The Ghost article adds a zero for length in the template:

<enclosure url="{{og_description}}" length="0" type="audio/mpeg"/>

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:waving_hand: Yeah, that was me. :slight_smile: I open-sourced a version of the code that does this: GitHub - cathysarisky/podcast-labeler

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Interesting! A little scary to depend on a webhook, but it would be so nice to only have one system for publishing text and sound.

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You could also skip the webhook and manually populate that field.

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I think it would be possible to parse the src attribute of first audio element from post content, by abusing split helper. By adding a tag-based condition (like if post has tag #podcast-episode), an rss feed can be generated by using uploaded audio files inside the content.

I couldn’t try this idea but looks like doable to me.

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Yeah, I was thinking that thought after I posted here. Haven’t tried it, but /probably/ possible.

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