How to Create a Podcast Using an RSS Feed and Google Podcasts

As a frequent listener of audio content, I often find myself jumping between different apps to listen to my favorite podcasts, audiobooks, and other tracks. It can be inconvenient to have a large number of audio files on my phone or in the cloud, especially if I need to download them or be connected to the internet to access them.

To solve this problem, I decided to create my own podcast using an RSS feed and Google Podcasts. An RSS feed is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized format. By creating a hosted audio list in the form of an RSS feed, I could easily manage my audio content and access it all in one place through Google Podcasts.

In this article, I'll walk you through the steps to create your own podcast using an RSS feed and Google Podcasts.

Step 1: Host Your Audio Files

The first step is to host your audio files in a secure location. I used Firebase Storage to host my files, but you can use any hosting service that supports direct links to your audio files. To ensure that my files were safe, I added a security rule to my Firebase bucket that allowed read access but disallowed write access:

rules_version = '2';
service firebase.storage {
  match /b/{bucket}/o {
    match /{allPaths=**} {
      allow read: if true; // Allow anyone to read the files
      allow write: if false; // Do not allow anyone to upload or modify files
    }
  }
}

Once your files are hosted, make note of the direct links to each file. You'll need these links to create your RSS feed in the next step.

Step 2: Create Your RSS Feed

Next, you'll need to create an RSS feed that includes the direct links to your audio files. To make this easier, I wrote a Node.js program that creates theRSS XML file for me.

To use this program, save it as a JavaScript file on your computer and modify the variables at the top of the file to match your own hosting and podcast information. Then, run the program using Node.js to generate the RSS XML file.

Here's an example of what your final RSS XML file might look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rss xmlns:itunes="http://www.itunes.com/dtds/podcast-1.0.dtd" version="2.0">
  <channel>
    <title>My Podcast</title>
    <link>https://example.com/podcast/</link>
    <description>A podcast created using an RSS feed and Google Podcasts</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <itunes:author>My Name</itunes:author>
    <itunes:summary>A podcast created using an RSS feed and Google Podcasts</itunes:summary>
    <itunes:image href="https://example.com/podcast.jpg"/>
    <itunes:category text="Technology"/>
    <itunes:explicit>no</itunes:explicit>
    <item>
      <title>Episode 1: My First Episode</title>
      <link>https://example.com/podcast/episode1.mp3</link>
      <guid>https://example.com/podcast/episode1.mp3</guid>
      <description>My first episode of the podcast</description>
  </channel>
</rss>

Now that we have our RSS feed ready, we need to publish it. To do that, we need to upload the audio files and the RSS feed to a server. In this example, we will use Firebase to host our files.

Once we have our files uploaded to Firebase Storage, we can generate the RSS feed XML file using Node.js. We can use a package like rss to make the process easier. Here's an example code snippet:

const RSS = require('rss');
const { Storage } = require('@google-cloud/storage');

// Initialize Firebase Storage
const storage = new Storage({
  projectId: 'your-project-id',
});

// Create a new RSS feed
const feed = new RSS({
  title: 'My Podcast',
  description: 'A podcast about my favorite things',
  feed_url: 'https://my-podcast.com/feed.xml',
  site_url: 'https://my-podcast.com',
});

// Get a list of all audio files in Firebase Storage
const [files] = await storage.bucket('your-bucket-name').getFiles();

// Add each audio file to the RSS feed
files.forEach(file => {
  const url = `https://storage.googleapis.com/your-bucket-name/${file.name}`;
  feed.item({
    title: file.name,
    description: 'Listen to this audio track',
    url,
    enclosure: {
      url,
      size: file.metadata.size,
      type: 'audio/mpeg',
    },
  });
});

// Generate the XML file
const xml = feed.xml();

In this example, we are using the rss package to create a new RSS feed with a title, description, feed URL, and site URL. We then use the @google-cloud/storage package to get a list of all audio files in our Firebase Storage bucket. For each audio file, we add an item to the RSS feed with a title, description, URL, and enclosure (which specifies the audio file URL, size, and type). Finally, we generate the XML file using feed.xml().

Once we have our RSS feed XML file, we can upload it to our server and add it to Google Podcasts. To add our podcast to Google Podcasts, we need to submit our RSS feed URL to the Google Podcasts Portal. Once Google verifies our podcast, it will be added to the Google Podcasts directory.

And that's it! With just a few steps, we have created a podcast and made it available on Google Podcasts. Of course, there are many other things we can do to improve our podcast, such as adding cover art, optimizing the audio quality, and promoting the podcast. But this should give you a good starting point to create your own podcast.