Technical Details
How are the Laity Square site and podcast produced?
Site
The site is built using the Hugo Web site generator, and hosted on Amazon AWS (S3 for storage, Route 53 for DNS, and CloudFront for distribution). It uses a customized version of the AlphaChurch Hugo theme.
Podcast
The podcast is recorded on Audacity for Windows, using a Behringer XM8500 dynamic mic, connected to an ART Pro Audio TubeMP pre-amplifier and a Steinberg UR22mkII interface. Editing roughly follows The Seasoned Podcaster’s podcast EQ guidelines, using the Parametric EQ, De-Clicker and De-Esser Audacity plug-ins in addition to the built-in Amplify, Compressor, Noise Gate and Loudness Normalize effects. The intro/outro song is Time, by Ashutosh.
Audio files are stored on Amazon S3. The feed XML is automatically generated by Hugo, and it’s registered with Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, PocketCasts and Spotify.
Closed-captioned episodes are also available on YouTube and Instagram TV. A blank video is created from the final episode MP3, using Shotcut. It is uploaded as a temporary private video to YouTube, in order to get auto-generated captions. The captions are cleaned up with Aegisub, and “burned” to the final video using Handbrake. Separately, a Spanish caption .srt file is created with Aegisub and uploaded to YouTube as well.