Patrick Says

A very quick note to let you know that this week’s Forty-Eight Hour Challenge has been selected. From Friday night through Sunday night, I will subsist on nothing but Fla-Vor-Ice. Heck yes!

I had a great post planned for this evening. It was about some of the fallacies of religion. It was inspired by a card from PostSecret.com I saw a week ago. But apparently, PostSecret doesn’t do archives, so now I can’t get it. Without the visual, it just wouldn’t be the same.

Thanks for nothing, Frank.

Monday morning quiz! Name these two songs by their plot lines!

1. Ooooh, I talked to a homeless guy. Now I’m all wise.
2. I drove my girlfriend to get an abortion. Now I’m depressed. She’s depressed. She’s more depressed. We confess! I’m still depressed.

Answers in the comments. First correct wins bragging rights!

I really really dislike those Mac ads.
That’s why this gives me so much joy.

A fellow blogger from the Saint Louis Bloggers Guild turned me onto a very cool plugin. It’s actually part of a service provided by Odiogo.com. It takes your blog posts and turn them into podcasts, which are audio versions that can be played through an media player or directly on your computer.

But the service is actually more than that. They provide plugins for various platforms (including WordPress) that can be integrated right into the posts. For example, at the beginning of this post on my site, there should be a small badge that says ‘listen now’. Clicking that will open a small window and begin playing this post right here.

The service also creates an RSS feed so people can subscribe to the audio versions of your blog. This service comes at a really great time as someone close to me is struggling with some vision issues and looking at the computer screen for more than a couple minutes causes problems. With this, she can at least listen to my blog posts.

And the voice reading the posts is pretty good. He does mess up. Really, all of them will. But he is very natural-sounding as the voices go. Also, the service (at this time) is free, which makes it a no-brainer.

Give it a listen and consider expanding your audience to people who access their content a different way.