Welcome to The Blind Planet

Welcome to The Blind Planet! The Blind Planet is a rapidly-growing web site that offers a lot of valuable information for the blind community, and / or for those people who are interested in learning about blindness and how blind people go about their daily lives. Regardless of whether you are blind, sighted, a novice or a professional at technology, or are just searching for help and / or information on a particular topic, you will definitely find the Blind Planet to be one of your favorite web sites very quickly.

I have a variety of material available for you to browse through. You will find many audio podcasts and tutorials on different topics. These can range from software and hardware reviews / tutorials on different software programs and hardware devices that blind people use on a daily basis to sound-seeing tours of places such as museums, parks, etc. You will find audio files from not only myself, but I post audio files that others create as well so you can hear about the experience of other blind individuals in the community. The Blind Planet is a community-driven site, which means that the growth of the site depends heavily on its users and contributions from the blind community. You can even submit your own audio files and other content to the site yourself without my intervention! (For more information on how to do this, please see the "Submitting Content to The Blind Planet" heading below). You can even have your own blog on the site if you want with your very own RSS feed. I also have links to many blindness-related web sites that focus on specific topics related to blindness. There are links to many blindness-related mailing lists where you can ask questions on certain topics and make new friends with others in the blind community. I have also compiled a constantly-growing list of documents and programs that I've found on the internet over time that you may find useful.

I also offer one-on-one training and technical support on many popular computer software programs at very low and reasonable rates. If you are in need of training or support, please check out the training and support area of the site for additional information.

Site News

Wednesday, December 16, 2009: We here at Blind Planet would like to wish everyone a very happy holiday season! We hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a great new years day. We are also pleased to announce that we now own our hardware used to run the site. Blind Planet is currently running on a server with dual Quad Core Intel Xeon L5420 CPUs, 8 GB of RAM and is on a 100 Mbps network port. Our server is located in the Silicon Valley Telecom and Internet Exchange (SVTIX) datacenter in San Jose, California. This allows us to keep the site running at very fast performance. Also, we are proud to announce that our TeamTalk voice chat server is back up and running! It was down for several months due to bandwidth constraints and CPU / memory limitations on our old server. For those who haven't noticed, we also changed our template / theme over the summer so that the site is easier on the eyes. We now use white text on a black background which should make it much better for low-vision / partially sighted users to use. Several new sources for news have been added to the News Aggregator as well. We hope you enjoy these changes, and we will be adding many more features in the coming months. Thanks, and we will see you all in 2010!

Friday, October 31, 2008: Blind Planet is pleased to announce that we are now running our very own TeamTalk server for anyone in the blind community to use free of charge! We have now moved over from shared hosting to our very own virtual private server (VPS) which made this possible. Thanks to everyone who requested this feature, and we hope you enjoy it! To begin using our TeamTalk server to voice chat with others, simply click here to go to our voice chat page. Also, you should now notice a significant improvement in the speed of loading pages on the site. We have also added some new blogs and RSS feeds to the news aggregator, so we hope you'll find those fun and useful as well. Lastly, happy Halloween to everyone!

Thursday, June 19, 2008: Michael Feir, Creator and former editor of Audyssey Magazine, has just released a new series he created called Personal Power. This is a guide to help blind people explore the many leisure activities and personal pursuits which their accessible computers make available to them. It is based on Michael's own experience with technology stretching back over two decades. The series consists of a guide in RTF format along with three lectures in MP3 format. You can check out the new Personal Power series by clicking here! We thank Michael Feir for allowing us to post his material on Blind Planet, and hope that it will be beneficial to many.

Audio Podcasts and Tutorials

My audio files section contains many podcasts and tutorials on many different subjects. These include reviews and demonstrations of many popular software programs and hardware devices that are used in the blind community. You will also find other useful information such as cooking podcasts, sound-seeing tours and more!

News Aggregator

The news aggregator is a system that checks various internet sites for blindness-related news every twenty minutes, and if new content is available, downloads it to the Blind Planet for you to read in the news aggregator section at your convenience. The news aggregator also has it's own RSS feed which you can add to your RSS reader. The URL to the news aggregator's RSS feed is

http://www.blind-planet.com/aggregator/rss

The Blind Planet News Aggregator is your hub to all of the latest news about the blind community.

Documents

In my documents section, you will find various text and PDF documents that I've collected from various sources which might be useful to you. If you have a document that you would like added to this section, please contact me and let me know.

Web Links

I've compiled a list of web links to many different places on the internet. These links lead to many useful blindness-related web sites, friends' sites, blogs, informational web sites, shopping web sites for blindness-related items, screen-reader manufacturers / developer sites, scripts, utilities, accessible games, programming sites, audio-related web sites, podcasts, tutorials and lots of other cool stuff!

Mailing Lists

The mailing lists section contains links to many blindness-related mailing lists all over the internet. Mailing lists are a great way to get help with something or ask questions of others. They can also serve as a mechanism for making new friends from all over the globe. If you know of a mailing list that is not listed here, or if you run your own mailing list and you would like it to be added to the list of links, please contact me and let me know.

Software Programs

My software programs section contains many useful software programs, scripts and utilities. If you have a program that you would like to see added to this list, please contact me and let me know.

Training and Technical Support

If you would like customized one-on-one training and / or technical support on almost any PC-related issue, please check out my training and technical support page. I offer training and technical support at a very low and reasonable rate of just $5.00 per hour.

RSS Feed

I have an RSS feed that you can put into your podcatching client to get the latest content from my site. The link to the main feed where you can get the latest site updates including written content is:

http://www.blind-planet.com/rss.xml

and the address to the audio (podcast) feed is:

http://www.blind-planet.com/audio/feed

Forums / Message Boards

A great way to interact with other users in the community is through the Blind Planet Forums. You can discuss almost anything you want on the message boards, from daily living skills, to getting technology help to just talking about random things. We have different boards for almost any topic, so feel free to post and invite others too!

Submitting Content to The Blind Planet

One of the unique things about the Blind Planet web site is that it gives you the ability to submit content of your own to the site and have it appear to the public instantly. You can submit audio files (podcasts) of almost anything. You can create news stories, create books and add pages to them, static pages and more. You can even have your own blog with us along with your own RSS feed! To create your own content on the site, all you have to do is register a user account with us so that we know who is who and who is submitting what on the site. Once you've done that and successfully logged in to the site, simply click on the content link on the site's navigation menu, and then click on the "Create Content" link that appears right below the content link in the menu. Then just follow the instructions to create whatever content you want. For example, let's say you want to submit a podcast. After clicking on "Create Content", click on the "Audio" link in the list of different types of content. Fill in the form with the appropriate information. Note when submitting audio files that if you are submitting an MP3 file that already has ID3 tags in it, the system will automatically detect those and display the artist, title, year, genre, etc automatically, so it's up to you as to whether or not you want to fill in that information manually. Once you're done filling in the info, simply click "submit" and you're done. I hope you enjoy using this feature!

Personalized User Profiles, Account Settings and Private Messages

Each registered user on the site has their own user profile. You are given the option of specifying certain information in your profile such as what state you live in, etc. All users of the site are able to browse through the profiles of the different users on the site. You can even narrow down your search to a specific profile field. For example, you have the ability of finding other people who live in the same state as you do.

Each registered user on the site can customize their account settings to their liking. For example, you can choose to view comments in a certain format (e.g. threated view, expanded style) and have that setting remembered each time you login to your account on the site so that you don't always have to choose your favorite view when reading comments on posts.

Registered users on the site have the ability to send private messages to each other using the site's private-messaging system. Using the "My Inbox" link in the navigation menu, you can check your messages, compose messages to others, as well as create and organize messages into different folders as you wish.

Shoutbox / Instant Chat

Registered users who are logged into the site will have access to our Shoutbox, an almost realtime text chat feature that is useable from any page on the site. To send a message to everyone, simply type your message into the shoutbox edit field and click the "Shout" button. Your message will instantly appear in the shoutbox. The shoutbox displays ten messages at a time and old messages are archived in case other users want to go back and look at past shouts.

Jott Support

How would you like to be able to post to the site via the telephone? Well, there is an answer to that wish! One of the unique features of the Blind Planet web site is support for the new Jott voice-to-text transcription service! Using Jott's service you can blog instantly to this site using your voice, share random thoughts with others, and post almost anything you'd like to your account just by dialing a toll-free telephone number, speaking your message and hanging up. Within a few minutes, whatever you said on the telephone will be posted to this site in text format, and you and other users will even see a link below your post allowing them to listen to your audio version! If you'd like to use Jott to post to this site, you'll need an account on the Jott web site. Once you complete the sign-up process, from within your Jott account, click on the "Jott Links" link in the navigation menu, and choose to add a new Jott Link. Fill in the parameters as follows:

Link Name: you can enter anything you want here (example: Blind Planet)
Setup URL: http://www.blind-planet.com/jottsetup
Link URL: http://www.blind-planet.com/jottlink

When you click save you will be redirected to the Blind Planet to confirm, log in (if you're not already logged in) to save your Jott userKey and activate your Jott Link. Call Jott from the phone number you set your Jott.com account up with and say the name of the Jott Link you configured above and then your message. Jott.com will send you an email or SMS when your jott is transcribed if you've set it up to do so, at which point it will have been posted to the Blind Planet. That's it, just keep Jotting away! I hope you enjoy using this feature!

User Points

We have a user points system that allows users to earn points by doing things on the site (e.g. posting in the forums, submitting audio, posting comments, inviting friends, etc). At this time these points are not really used for anything, but we may make use of them in the future.

Invitations

We have an invitations system that allows users to send invitations to friends or anyone else they'd like to invite to the site. You can even track your invitations to see whether the people you sent invitations to accepted your invitation or not. If the person you are inviting has accepted your invitation, you'll be able to go to their profile page from within your "Your Invitations" tab of the "Invite your friends or colleagues" section of the site.

Other Stuff

The Blind Planet is a new web site that opened on January 15, 2008. New features will be added on a regular basis, so be sure to check back often. Also, remember that the Blind Planet is meant to be an active online community, so the features that get added to the site and what order they are worked on depends heavily on feedback submitted by users of the site and its services. We strive our best to give users what they want, so please send any feature requests to us that you think would be helpful or that you think would be cool for the site. There is no such thing as a stupid question and / or answer and / or suggestion around here, so we'll actively try to improve the site for you no matter how major or minor your feature request is. Please submit feedback either by using the contact form, by posting in the forums, by submitting a podcast with your feedback, by blogging about it here, or by any other means you like!

Donations

If you would like to help by making a contribution to the Blind Planet web site, please click here. Your donations go towards expanding the web site and keeping it running, as well as purchasing new technology to produce new tutorials, reviews and demonstrations.