Listen to your blog and blog podcasting

I have recently added a “Listen to this article” link in my post footer and a link to my podcast feed in my blog’s sidebar. Using the link in my post footer, you can listen to my articles by way of streaming mp3 audio. Isn’t that cool?

Yes. But how did you do that?

I was never into podcasting and had no clue about it. However, while browsing instabloke, I came across a link in its post footer which read “Listen to this post”. Through that link I found out about Talkr.

Talkr is a podcast server that’s very easy and free to use. To learn more about Talkr click here registering at Talkr, you can submit your blog’s RSS feed to them and the. Aftery will create a podcast feed with your posts converted into speech perhaps using some “text-to-speech” software at their end and it’s pretty fast too. So you don’t have to use podcast creation software, host the prepared MP3 files somewhere and setup a feed to it. Talkr will take care of it all. Talkr will also contain instructions on how to add the “Listen to this article” link and a Talkr chicklet to your blog. However, you may use the following piece of code for setting up the post footer links in your blogger beta blogs. (To learn more about working with post footers refer to my previous article

<a expr:href='"http://www.talkr.com/app/fetch.app?feed_id=
[Your Talkr Feed id]&amp;perma_link=" + data:post.url' target='_blank' title='Click to listen'>
Listen to this article</a>

However, I have also faced certain problems. For example, even after setting up the feed over a day ago I still don’t see all of my articles in my podcast feed. Pronunciation of certain words by the automated voice it not very good (I love it when she pronounces my name :D).

Moving on, once you have the podcast feed, you might want to use FeedBurner to dress it up i.e. optimize it and publicize it using chicklets and other features that they offer. To publicize you podcast further, just submit its feed link to podcast feed crawlers. A quick search for “submit podcast feed” in Google will bring up a number of such crawlers/ search engines. When submitting you podcast feeds to crawlers or blogging communities etc I prefer using a well dressed feed like feed burner’s and not the source podcast link because clicking on a feed burner feed link displays a page that your potential readers might like to go through unlike the code gibberish that they would see when they click on the source feed’s link.

Why podcasts?

Podcast is one of the few technologies that entered main-stream from obscurity in a very quick fashion. It’s in and people use it to keep a track of whatever they like. In addition, podcast feeds, promise a wider reach for an average blogger by way of supplying readers with downloadable audio file which they can store in their MP3 player and listen to anywhere or share with others. Such audio files may also be shared on P2P networks, BitTorrents and IRC thus giving you a wider reach. So isn’t that a reason enough?

Podcast feed reader

Well I am pretty new to this stuff but I think I have found a good feed reader for myself and it seems this one is pretty popular too. I am talking about Juice. Juice is a cross-platform podcast receiver which is available for free under the GPL open source. For more features of Juice, you may visit its website.

Click here to learn more about podcasts. If you find more examples of podcast servers (with text-to-speech ability) or a better podcast logo (see the subscribe section in the sidebar), please leave a comment about the same here. Thanks!