Add audio to your homepage: a daily playlist, or always the latest article

When a site adds audio to its articles, the player goes at the top of each article page. That is where most listening happens, so it is the right first move. But it assumes the visitor has already chosen a story. Someone landing on the homepage, scanning headlines, not yet committed to anything, has nothing to press.

We offer two players built for that visitor. Each is a single line to paste into your homepage template, and they solve different problems. Which one you want depends mostly on how often you publish.

The morning edition: today's articles, back to back

The first is a playlist that builds itself. It takes your articles that were turned into audio over the last 24 hours, newest first, and plays them in sequence. The listener presses play once and hears the day's output without touching the screen again. The card header shows how many articles are in it and the total running time, so a listener knows before starting whether this is a seven minute commute or a forty minute walk.

The rules are specific, and they are worth knowing before you put it on a homepage:

• At most 20 tracks in the card. Past that it stops being an edition and becomes an archive.
• If nothing was published in the last 24 hours, the card does not go blank. It falls back to your five most recent articles, and the title changes from "The morning edition" to "Latest articles". An empty card looks broken; an old list labelled as today's edition misleads. The title tells the truth about which case you are in.
• A track that fails to load is skipped, so one bad file does not stop the rest.
• Every track is a real button, reachable by keyboard, and the playing track is exposed to screen readers rather than shown only by colour. If the account's default language is English, the card interface is in English too.

The playlist synthesises nothing. It plays audio files that already exist for your articles, so it uses no credits. You embed it with an iframe; the snippet is ready to copy in the distribution section of your dashboard.

One edition per section

A general homepage is not always the right entry point. A local news site may want a sports edition on its sports page and a business edition elsewhere. Add ?rubrique=Sports to the iframe address and the selection narrows to that section, with the section name added to the card title. That only works if your articles carry a section; with our WordPress plugin, the first category of each post (other than "Uncategorized") is sent as its section.

If you already split your output into shows, this follows the same idea as turning a news site into an automatic podcast: decide the split once, and it holds.

Latest article: one player that follows you

The second option is simpler. It always points at your most recent article with audio, and updates by itself every time a new one is ready. Nothing on the homepage needs editing when you publish.

Under the hood it is not a separate player. The "latest" address looks up the newest article and redirects to the standard article player, with your chosen layout, colours and access settings intact. Whatever you configured for article pages applies here without repeating it. It accepts ?rubrique= as well, and if the requested section has nothing, it falls back to the newest article on the whole site instead of showing an empty frame. If you have no audio at all yet, it shows a short neutral notice rather than a broken iframe.

Which one fits your site

Ask how often you publish.

• Several stories a day (daily paper, news site, local outlet): the morning edition. It turns a page of headlines into a listening habit, which is about as close to the morning radio slot as a website gets.
• One or two posts a week (company blog, expert newsletter, brand publication): the latest article player. A daily playlist that almost always falls back to "Latest articles" adds nothing a single well placed player does not.
• A site organised around strong sections: one edition per section, placed on each section page.

You can use both, but two audio cards stacked on the same homepage compete for the same click. Pick one per page.

What they respect, and what they leave to you

Both players follow the same rules as the rest of the service:

• A version waiting for editorial approval never appears. If you use pre-publication review, unapproved audio stays out of both.
• Private audio, created for personal listening in the Radio app, never appears.
• If full listening is restricted to registered users or subscribers, the playlist serves the previews, exactly as the article player does for an anonymous visitor.

They do not curate. Order is publication order, not an editor's pick or a popularity ranking. If you want a hand-picked edition, or want to render it in your own player or app, the same selection is available as JSON through the API (GET /api/v1/selection), with total duration, chapters and a summary per track, and a time window you can widen up to a week.

One honest caveat: for public accounts the playlist page is cached for five minutes. A story published at 7:02 may only show up at 7:07. For a homepage that is the cost of a fast load, and we would rather say so up front.

Knowing whether it works

Each track started from the playlist counts as one listen for its article, tagged with its own origin in the Listens screen. You can see whether the homepage actually drives listening, next to plays on article pages and on your section-by-section audio page. If after a few weeks it does nothing, that is a result too: move it higher on the page once, and if it still does nothing, take it off.

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