I’m in the process of really shaking up the JCU (Jared Content Universe) this summer, and one aspect of that which has become clear to me is I need to find a new podcast hosting platform.

Historically, my Fresh Fusion podcast has been a hodgepodge of techniques: the MP3 files themselves are hosted on Amazon S3 (ugh, not a service I want to support anymore), the RSS feed and pages are hosted here on my static site, and I use a proxy in front of the S3 URLs in the form of Blubrry for analytics.

Meanwhile, two other podcasts I’ve worked on which are currently on hiatus, Fullstack Ruby and Just a Spec, are hosted on Buzzsprout…except I use Fullstack Ruby for the episode pages and Buzzsprout itself for the Just a Spec website. 🤪

It’s all a bit of a mess. While I do like Buzzsprout, it makes it hard to experiment with new podcasts over time because every single show is its own subscription. And while I like the idea of Blubrry as a way of adding analytics support to any set of podcast files, its UX leaves a lot to be desired (and also costs a small monthly fee).

All that to say: I’m on the hunt for a new podcasting service with a single (low) price for an unlimited number of shows, plus the very critical feature that it integrates well with Buttondown. For you see, dear reader, my recent efforts to record audio editions of my Cycles Hyped No More newsletter (hosted on Buttondown) has made it crystal clear for me that I freakin’ love writing essays and also recording them as spoken word as part of a unified artifact.

Anyway, I’m gearing up to do a whole lotta podcasting soon, and that means I need what is essentially the core infrastructure for a podcast network. There are a couple of options I’m looking at, and once I have a clearer idea of how it all looks, I’ll publish my findings here in a follow-up post!