Monday Jul 14, 2008

Turn Your Blog into a Podcast

Now that I have a half hour commute to work, I've been thinking how great it would be if I could listen to my favorite Blogs into a podcast that I could listen to anytime. I started scouring the internet for an online utility that would do the trick. I came across Talkr.com which allows you to turn any rss feed into a podcast.

While the basics are quite simple, the whole process is quite involved, are many steps involved so bear with me. The first thing you must do is register for free with Talkr.com. Once you have registered, select my Podcasts. You will see there is a place to add an rss feed. Simply paste the rss feed link into the textbox and click the add rss feed button. That's the basics.

Now download Juice 2.2 which is a cross-platform podcast receiver. If you run Vista you will need to tweak some settings to get it to work (what else is new). The instructions can be found here. Now all you have to do is add the "Talkr feed" you created at Talkr.com and download the articles you wish to listen to. Upload them to your mp3 player and your good to go!

If you've been reading my blog at all, you know that my curiosity always gets the better of me. I started wondering how can I integrate an automatic podcast converter for my own blog articles, so that my readers wouldn't have to go through the whole process mentioned above to gain access to an audio version of my podcast.

The first site I discovered that will do this is vozMe. I followed the instructions for adding the code to Blogger websites and was easily able to add a link that let my readers at Zenodotus.net download individual articles for their listening pleasure. The one caveat is I did not like the voices used to read the text.

Then I started thinking why re-invent the wheel? Back to Talkr.com I went and sure enough they have instructions on how to add a listen to this article link at the end of every post. You must be logged in to your account to find the link.

Visit this blog article to find detailed instructions on how to add the proper code to your blogger site. There are two small changes to the code that need to be made:

  1. In the part of the code that reads &;perma_link you must change it to &perma_link or Blogger will scream about errors.
  2. Change the feed_id to match your id at Talkr.com.

Honestly, it seems a lot easier than it is. It took me most of the day! But I think it was well worth the efforts. Now you can enjoy listening to your favorite Blogs even if they do not have a podcast!

Next week I plan on doing a Ustream broadcast that walks you through the entire proces. By then I hope to have a way to integrate Talkr with Xanga.

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