Turn your Nikola blog into a podcast

I’ve had my very own podcast (netcast) for a few weeks now. You may even be listening to this blog post if you discovered my podcast through one of the many podcast directories on the Web.

Nikola version 7, released ten days ago, is required to use my new Speech Synthesized Netcast plug-in. The plug-in will automatically record a text-to-speech synthesized version of each post in a Nikola powered blog. The recordings will be available in a variety of audio formats and included in an RSS feed.

The reading quality isn’t perfect but it’s understandable. Proper nouns, name, and trademarks will cause the most problems. The text-to-speech synthesizer used in the plug-in is powered by Espeak.

Multilingual sites are also supported, and each post will be read in an approximation of the language dialect. Introductions and outros can be configured for each language.

How can I get my own podcast?

Assuming your blog is powered by Nikola, you can use my new plug-in:

  1. Upgrade to Nikola version 7.0
  2. Run nikola install_plugin speechsynthesizednetcast
  3. Run nikola build as usual

There’s a little bit more to it if you want to change things up. However, this is the bare minimum for what is required assuming you’ve all the necessary software. The plug-in will inform you if you are missing something. There are no weird software dependencies; all should be available in every Linux distribution.

Review the available documentation and configuration options in the Nikola pug-in repository.