Last week I discovered that typepad users (this blog is hosted on typepad) can now move subscribers of
their typepad rss feed over to their feedburner feed which has more
functionality as well as better statistics.
The number of people
showing up in my feed stats suddenly jumped from around 250-300 a day to
over 600 a day as soon as I made the change, which got me wondering how else
people might be subscribing to cybersoc.com.
Then I recalled that, at one point, I signed up for Talkr, a service that takes my RSS feed and turns it into a podcast. I also let the iTunes store know where to find my Talkr feed.
For some reason, it never really dawned on me that people might be accessing the content here this way but I’ve just been pleasantly surprised to find that the audio version of cybersoc.com has been accessed over 1000 since January 2006. That’s not a huge number of listeners but it’s still something.
The coolest part is that people who might not otherwise be able to read this blog – those with visual impairment, for example – may very well be using the audio version instead. My grandfather, who died a few years ago, was blind for the last several years of his life and certainly could have benefited from functionality like this.
I want to improve access to this particular feature of the blog but can’t figure out how to make the necessary changes to template to enable each and every post to carry the necessary audio file.
If there is anyone out there who knows their way around typepad templates and might be able to help me out for a second, I’d greatly appreciate it…
[PS. Here’s this post as an mp3]
Robin, to do this automagically is tricky as talkr uses numbers to title each item and there’s no obvious way of matching them to the original post. Each days numbers do seem to run incrementally, but the number block changes each day, and as yet I can’t find a way of predicting the change.
While you’re embedding .mp3s in your pages you might be interested in http://del.icio.us/help/playtagger which I’m using on a site I’m running.