I was just checking referrals today and found some from HearABlog, a new startup which narrates blogs for consumption on the go. Apparently they used my blog as an example to demo their service, making podcasts of the following three posts:
- Practical Metaprogramming: Storing User Preferences (download)
- Tracking Down a Subtle Analytics Bug (download)
- The IE CSS Bug Which Cost Me A Month’s Salary (download)
The quality is quite good — I’m especially impressed at their oral descriptions of the screenshots and graphs that were crucial to understanding some of those posts. The translator in me approves immensely. My only constructive criticism: Cal-zoo-ME-us, not Cal-zoo-MAY-us. Because even made up words have a canonical pronunciation, even if only in my mind. :)
I’m not sure if strictly speaking creating derivative works from this blog is copyright kosher without asking me first, but in the interests of supporting people doing cool things, HearABlog has my explicit permission to produce and distribute audio recordings of all my blog posts on this site, and that will continue until I say otherwise. (I have no particular plans of ever doing it but, hey, you never know.)
A request to people doing cool things in the future: I have an email address a marked aversion to saying “No”, so please, feel free to tell me about it in advance.
Edited to add: I just went back and checked my email, and Pablo from HearABlog did try to get in touch with me on October 29th. Unfortunately, he managed to email me when I was on a plane over the Pacific, and I didn’t see the email later in the crush of payment notifications. (A high class problem, to be sure. Halloween is my busy season.)
Hello Patrick,
My apologies for the in-communication from our side. You know how it is when you are starting something. Everything is a mess and there’s enough work to keep everybody busy for a year. I’ll try to be more careful in the future.
Beyond that, thanks for the positive response. We are very happy to have you on board and let’s hope is for many, many more posts.
Cheers!
Time to separate out your email addresses, so your payment notifications don’t interfere with unexpected opportunities.