Mashable’s Doriano “Paisano” Carta published this week-end another of his popular HOW TO: articles. In his post titled HOW TO: Convert Your Blog Into a Podcast on iTunes for Free, Paisano provides a detailed step-by-step guide for Text-to-Speech conversion using Odiogo. The author stresses the added value brought to the visually impaired and also to readers with learning disabilities such as dyslexia. As a demonstration of the ease of use and set-up, Paisano helped Rachel from Why Not Rachel set-up Odiogo on her blog.

After detailing the plethora of features provided by Odiogo and listing other players in the space, the author concludes as follows:

Providing greater accessibility to your content makes a great deal of sense for several reasons. It not only gives your readers more ways to experience your blog, but it also allows many others to enjoy your work that otherwise couldn’t do so. Text-to-speech technology continues to improve with time, so look for this feature to spread across the blogosphere, slowly but surely as people realize that the web isn’t just for viewing but for hearing too.

See also, the discussion thread inspired by this post on mashable, especially Rachel’s comment:

You have no idea how wonderful, and liberating adaptive tech has been for people with print disabilities! I’m really grateful to Pai for helping to make my site more accessible…

Good news for iPhone and iPod Touch owners: The January 2008 update (aka firmware 1.1.3) includes support for the lyrics option. With this feature, Odiogo users can visualize on their device the text content of an article or blog post of an Odiogo feed. This is helpful for those who want to quickly browse through a story before reading it.

More on this feature in a previous post.

We usually keep these for our testimonials page… but could not resist blogging about it: the February ‘08 edition of Stuff Magazine (UK) lists us as Essential Webware, qualifying Odiogo as a genius website…

We’re honored - thanks!

By default, our system checks updates in your blog’s content every couple of hours. Using XML-RPC allows to notify us that you have updated your blog (new or modified post). Invoking the XML-RPC service will allow a faster availability of the audio files of your site.

Here are the instructions to define the Odiogo XML-RPC server in installed versions of WordPress.

1. Login to your WordPress admin account
2. Click menu Options > Writing
3. Under Update Service add URL http://rpc.odiogo.com/ping/ in the text box. Make sure to separate multiple service URLs with line breaks.
   (Note: If don’t see the text box, click menu Options > Privacy and enable Blog visibility)
4. Click Update Options

Good news for iPhone and iPod touch owners: Our popular Listen Button is now supported on the Safari browser of both the iPhone and all flavors of iPod Touch. There are no settings to make: The Environment Recognizes automatically the device and adapts the behavior of the Listen Button.

When clicked, the Listen Button will open QuickTime to play the audio version of the article/post.

Happy listening!

This post details the setting to perform in iTunes in order to properly handle the download of the audio files generated by Odiogo for your feed.
By default, iTunes downloads only the latest audio file of a feed. To ensure all new audio posts are downloaded when synchronizing the iPod with the PC/Mac, you need to remind your users to make the following settings in iTunes:

1. Select menu Edit > Preferences
2. In the Podcasts tab, on the questions When new episodes are available, select Download all
3. Click OK

Most iPod models and other MP3 players have a lyrics feature which allows to display the lyrics of a song while listening to it. We’ve decided to take advantage of this somehow secret attribute to display the textual content of a post. We find this feature pretty useful in many cases: for users who want to quickly browse through a story before deciding if they want to read it, for language learners who want to read and listen, and also for those who prefer using their device as a handy portable RSS reader. The following describes the process to visualize the lyrics on an iPod after it has been synchronized with iTunes and the la.foodblogging blog (to subscribe, click on the iTunes section here).

This feature has been successfully tested so far on fourth and fifth generation iPod, iPod mini and iPod nano. Please go ahead and play with this feature. The lyrics will appear on all posts of Odiogo enabled feeds published after August 28th, 01:00 am Pacific Standard Time. Feel free to share your comments either on this blog or through our contact page.

We’re pleased to see every month hundreds of bloggers subscribing to our service. It’s particularly exciting to follow the viral effect of a blogger discovering the Odiogo service on someone else’s blog, signing-up for it, implementing it, posting a blog about it which in turn triggers other bloggers to go through the same process…

DailyCupofTech, a blog that has recently added our service, posted a comprehensive article covering the motivation and the steps followed to deploy Odiogo. We think this is a great introduction to our service. Of course, it goes without saying that Daily Cup of Tech is not affiliated in any way to Odiogo!

It is sometimes needed to instruct the Odiogo system not to perform the text-to-speech process on parts of a post. To that effect we are supporting the following tags: <!-- odiogo-notts-begin --> and <!-- odiogo-notts-end -->.

Any text between both tags will not be included in the generated sound file. These tags are useful when you include in your posts excerpts that are in a language different than the main language of your blog or if you want to provide with some programming language example code that don’t need to be read in your post.

We’re often asked for a definition of RSS feeds. Instead of listing lines of definitions and examples, we thought this didactic 3.5 minutes video from CommonCraft provides with a good answer. Nice Job!