Chet wordmark with orange bowtie Chet wordmark with orange bowtie

Customizing Your Hosted Podcast Title and Artwork

Micro.blog offers a podcasting plan to add on to your blog subscription. This is a great feature that I’ve been using for over a year. I record a weekly podcast featuring my three children called ChetCast.

I love how my short posts, pictures, long posts, and podcasts all flow together on the same timeline. I have a ChetCast page that lists all of my previously recorded episodes.

There’s a small downside to having a podcast running on your main Micro.blog subscription. If you submit your podcast to Apple Podcasts (or anywhere else), Micro.blog by default defines your podcast title and artwork based on your blog. So your blog title is the podcast title, and your podcast artwork is your Micro.blog photo.

Manton plans to add the ability for everyone to change the podcast title and artwork in the Micro.blog dashboard at some point in the future. Until that feature is available, you can make the changes yourself if you’re using a custom theme.

I’m using Kiko. Go to Micro.blog > Posts > Design > Custom Themes. In your custom theme, under Custom Templates, find the file, layouts/list.podcastxml.xml.

To change the title, find the <title> tag. It should have a series of curly brackets between the title tag.

Simply replace all of that text your new title, without any quotation marks, between the <title> tags. Mine looks like this:

<title>ChetCast</title>

To add custom artwork, first create your image. Make it a square between 1400x1400 and 3000x3000, ensuring the file is no larger than 512kb. Upload that image to Micro.blog (micro.blog > Posts > Uploads). Copy the URL, and then go back to the layouts/list.podcastxml.xml page.

Find the <itunes:image> tag. It should have a link that points to your Micro.blog site. Replace the link between the quotation marks with the link to the artwork you uploaded. Mine looks like this:

<itunes:image href="https://www.chetjcollins.com/uploads/2019/309bb431cb.jpg"/>

That’s it! You’ve customized your podcast feed title and podcast artwork. You should see the changes in Apple Podcasts after the next refresh.

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