This blog is now available as a podcast that you can listen to via iTunes and I did not have to record anything and no, I did not have anyone else record it either. Well, at least no one that is human. Here is how it came about...
I came across a blog that had a "Listen" button on each of the articles and I thought that was interesting to have a audio version of each post. I had thought of doing the same myself, but it is a lot of work and time consuming. I clicked the button to see what it sounded like and I was greeted by a familiar voice. It sounded like Vicki, one of many text-to-speech voices used in Mac OS X that can read alerts and messages boxes to you. It can also read any other kind of text if you want it to. It would be a helpful feature for the sight impaired.
Upon further investigation I learned that the audio version of the blog was automatically generated by a free service called Talkr which makes it possible to listen to text only blogs on your iPod as long as you can bear to listen the computer generated voice. Which really is not bad once you get used to it. The punctuation is very good and the voice is clear.
To create a podcast version of my blog, I simply had to register as a partner with Talkr and submit the RSS feed address to my site. After a minute or so I recieved an address to the Talkr RSS feed for the podcast version of my blog, which is:
http://www.talkr.com/app/cast_pods.app?feed_id=31086
To subscribe to it with iTunes, you open iTunes, select the Advanced menu, select Subscribe to Podcast and paste the address in the box and click Save. That's it, you've subscribed to the podcast. I'll add a button or link to the side menu later.