Have flipped the speech engine from festival over to espeak http://espeak.sourceforge.net. Probably not as advanced as festival it does sound more robotic but it also sounds clearer and the ability to easily change the speed really seems to work out. Also have changed the bit rate from 16k to 22k so it should be playable by more mp3 players. Also changed the default theme and put the libsyn flash preview player on the site (needs 22k to play decently). Hopefully, this will improve the site a bit.

What tech does "On This Date" use? Wikipedia is used as the source for the event information. Festival is used for the voice synthesis. Wavtools is used to concatenate all the .wav files together. Lame is used to convert the .wav file to an .mp3 file Simplythebest.net is the source for the typing intro/close music. libsyn.com is my hosting provider. They quite simply rock! On This Date runs on a Gentoo GNU/Linux server running at my house. It takes it about 3 minutes to create the podcast and upload it to libsyn.com.