Hot Dorkage

Stumblers, readers, friends, and surfers,  I beg your indulgence just this once.  Permit me to take a break  from providing you the high quality dorkage that you’ve come to take for granted and let off a major bitchy rant.   If I don’t do this I’m going to blow a gasket!  What’s causing  my consternation?  Rampant mediocrity!  Basically I am fed up with sucky blogs.  Why do we put up with sucky blogs?  In theory free market Darwinism would cause them to wither away, so I can only venture a guess that there is still a need for education on just what constitutes a sucky blog.   Perhaps you aren’t so confident a blog connoisseur.  If not, please allow an experienced dork to educate you.

How do you know if your blog sucks?  Some clues….
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What is it with me and Text-To-Speech? Just fond memories, I guess. At one time I had a TalkR widget in my Blogger blog. It had a list of all the posts and it would speak whichever one you picked. It must have worked at one time or I would have never published it. I followed the directions at radio.talker.com to create one for this blog. The widget looked just fine but it didn’t work. In fact that entire widget seems to have gone south in general. So I’m not putting it here.

I also had a hack in the post template of my Blogger blog that would read each individual post but its code was blogger specific.

Good ol’ Wordpress to the rescue with a plugin for TalkR. I installed the TalkR plugin, registered the feed and now it is putting a little TalkR link at the bottom of every post. I had to install a codec in Firefox (Ubuntu) on the clientside to get it to stream mp3, but now it seems to work for me.

There is concern expressed in the ranks about the flakiness and spotty availability of TalkR. I removed both the widget and the individual post hack from the Blogger blog because, if I recall correctly, if TalkR went down the blog wouldn’t load. If it does that to Hot Dorkage I’ll have to disable the plugin.

Well there I am, summarized for all the world to see into a neat little bar graph. If you want to see how you stack up, go ahead and click the widget. It will take you to mypersonality.info where you can take the test yourself. It’s fun, fast and free and you’ll get a nice little widget souvenir like mine for your own blog. Continue Reading…