A few days ago Nathan pointed me to Talkr, a service that indexes your RSS, and then puts a voice to the words you’ve written. I subscribed immediately, found the mp3 links to go nowhere, but the feed got listed. I’ve sent a mail to the support address from Talkr, and boy are they friendly ! Turns out the CEO himself (Chris Brooks) replies to all the support emails personally and he even apologized for going on vacation for a week. Hah ! Cool. Anyway, he promised to look into it right away, and the same day (monday) everything got fixed.
He sent me a mail with the details of the error :
[...] “Here’s what caused the problem you ran into — our text to speech server ran into a glitch while I was out of the office, and it began creating zero-length audio files. We are recreating about 25,000 files, and should finish that process in the next couple of hours.
My guess is that any older posts should already be available as mp3s, and that posts from yesterday and today will be available within the next 6 to 12 hours.
Again, my apologies for the inconvenience. If for some reason you’re still experiencing a problem after 6 to 12 hours, please let me know, and I’ll make sure to track it down.
Thanks,
Chris”
See, now that’s PR ! A human face, put on a company. Interaction. Service. Awesome !
I think I’m going to switch to a semi-full feed, where I’m going to add more text to the rss for articles of a certain respectable length I’ve written myself. Not for copy-pasted material. I think that’d be wrong. So. In the future, some parts of my feed will be larger, to have an audio sample of it so Nathan can listen to it when he goes out for a walk.
So, the link to the podcasts is a feed and it’s a [Talkr RSS].
[Get started with Talkr and let your blog do the talking].
Check out some [Free Audio Feeds] at Talkr’s.
See who’s listed, alphabetically [Start with 'C', guess why] ;)