Thinking With… — website

A static site for Thinking With… A Rhetorical Theory Podcast: a home for the seasons, a place to publish writing, and a way to stay in touch with the audience.

Built with Astro. No database, no server — it builds to plain HTML/CSS and deploys anywhere (Netlify, Vercel, GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages).

Run it

npm install
npm run dev      # local preview at http://localhost:4321
npm run build    # static output in ./dist
npm run preview  # serve the built site locally

How it’s organized

• src/data/podcast.ts — the main content file. Show details, listen links, host bios, the six seasons (title, thinker, blurb, accent color, cover), and the series (NBA, Deep Cuts).
• src/data/episodes.json — episodes pulled from the existing public RSS feed (anchor.fm/s/4d44a168/podcast/rss), grouped by season. Audio plays straight from the feed, so nothing about your podcast hosting or subscribers changes.
• src/content/writing/*.md — articles. Add a Markdown file with the frontmatter shown in the existing posts to publish an essay. Set draft: true to keep it unpublished.
• src/pages/ — the routes (home, podcasts, seasons, series, writing, about, contact).
• src/components/, src/layouts/, src/styles/global.css — UI and the design system (palette, type) — edit global.css :root tokens to retune colors/fonts globally.
• public/covers/ — season cover art.

Things to finish (marked in code)

• Email list (src/pages/contact.astro): connect the signup form to your provider (Buttondown, Mailchimp, ConvertKit, or a Netlify form). Until then it falls back to email.
• NBA and Deep Cuts with Sircy (src/data/podcast.ts): placeholder descriptions — confirm what these are and what content belongs there.
• Writing: two seed essays (Rhetorical Theory of Language, Critique) are draft: true placeholders — paste the real text from the working docs.
• Season 6 — Being and Time: shows as “in production”; episodes appear automatically once they’re in the feed (or add a cover to public/covers/season-6.* and reference it).
• Set the production domain in astro.config.mjs (site:).

Refreshing episodes

When new episodes publish to the existing feed, regenerate src/data/episodes.json from the live RSS (see scraper/ in the repo root, or wire a small build step). This keeps the site in sync without touching your podcast host.