Background

One thing that has always been missing from V4V music is a simple music player for people and I've been working on one for The Doerfels over the past few months and I've taken that code and made a template from it. This uses a GitHub repo, a free Vercel account, your RSS feeds and a few art pieces from you.

This is the Doerfels site that this template is based off of.

This site have way more features then this template does but the template is meant to be a starting point for people and they can build on it or just use it as is.

Its all open and free to use and I'm willing to fix some bugs that are found but feature wise this is all I'm adding to the template.

https://itdv.podtards.com/

Getting started

I first started with making a GitHub template that also has a README with instruction on how to do all of this.

https://github.com/ChadFarrow/RSS-music-site-template

You start by making your own GitHub account and clicking the template button on my repo to copy it like I did with this one.

https://github.com/ChadF-Test/RSS-music-site

You then follow the steps to set up a free Vercel account and connect your new GitHub account to it. The GitHub has some template file that you enter your RSS feeds, your bands name or the name you want on the site, your background art, favicon image, logo and PWA icon. Then Vercel builds the site from the info in your RSS feed and the other info you added to GitHub. This is all automatic once its setup so you can make changes on GitHub and Vercel automatically makes the changes. Note that it does have to rebuild the site so it takes a few minutes to do that but you can watch that happen on the Vercel site or just wait and check it in 5 minutes. Even the smallest change triggers this so keep that in mind.

This all might sound complicated but its not that hard and its free and your in complete control.

The second GitHub link I shared also built the demo site for this that anyone can checkout before deciding to start this.

Anyone can now have their very own web player and mobile PWA app.

https://rss-music-site.vercel.app/

Boostagrams

This also supports Boost/Boostagrams (lightning bolt) that can be sent with things like the Alby browser extension and a NWC wallet. This requires the lightning payment info being in your feed and you need to turn this feature on by adding some info to Vercel but that's so that people that don't want lightning can use this and not have people asking what it is so its off by default and needs to be turned on.

Nostr

You can also make a nostr profile for this site that once you give it the nsec any Boost that is sent from this site will post to Nostr from that account and also viewable on the site from /boosts or by clicking on it in the side menu.

Like the lightning stuff this also has to be turned on in Vercel. For this once you have lightning enabled you enter your nsec for this site into Vercel and it turns this feature on.

Final thoughts

I tried to give an overview here without going into too much detail. The GitHub repo has all of this in the README that I followed when making the demo so it should work pretty well but its hard to add every single step into guides and GitHub and Vercel are kind of hard to navigate some times so any questions just reach out and I can help.

If you've played around with AI and vibecoding any you should be able to modify this to add features you want. I used Claude to build all of the code for this so making changes should be "easy" but this is a RSS site at its core so keep that in mind.

RSS first with lightning and nostr added on top of it.

Resources

Info on the podcasting 2.0 specs

https://podcasting2.org/docs/podcast-namespace

Podcasting 2.0 website

https://podcastindex.org/

Template to selfhost your RSS feed on GitHub

https://github.com/de-mu/demu-feed-template

Site that lets you create your own RSS that you can selfhost.

https://musicsideproject.com/