Feb. 11, 2007, 7:46 p.m.
posted by clayrat
Post to Your Blog
Use a mobile blogging service to post blog entries with pictures from your mobile phone.
Not long ago, bloggers could only update their blogs using a computer. Inspiration, however, does not always coincide with the presence of a bulky computer. At the turn of the century, some adventurous and creative bloggers started blogging from their mobile devices. The word moblog was thus coined, referring to blogging from a mobile device (mobile phones, PDAs, etc.).
If blogging without a computer is convenient, moblogging with a camera phone is exciting. In just a few clicks you can snap a quick shot and add a few punch lines, and minutes later the neatly formatted post on your personal blog can be shared with the entire world! Figure shows a snapshot of O'Reilly editor Brian Jepson's moblog. You can see Brian's world through pictures taken from his phone camera and comments that captured his instantaneous thoughts. (That dry spell between November and March? That's when Brian used a phone without a camera for a few months before switching back to his Nokia 3650.)
There are two major approaches to moblogging, regardless of the myriad phone models and their different capabilities: SMS moblogging and email moblogging. This hack introduces and compares these two methods, with an emphasis on the latter.
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SMS Moblogging
SMS moblogging works on any handset that can send SMS, which is virtually every mobile phone nowadays. You write the blog entry on the mobile phone and send it via SMS to a service phone number provided by a moblog service. The moblog service interprets the received SMS message and posts it to your blog. You can be identified by the caller ID or an ID code embedded in the SMS message. A good example of such an SMS moblog service is Txtsolutions (http://blog.txtsolutions.com). Txtsolutions can host your blog on its own site, or post your blog entries to your account in a list of supported third-party blog hosts.
An example photo moblog from Brian Jepson
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Despite the meager prerequisite of the handset, SMS moblogging has some major drawbacks. First is the nagging 160-character limitation for SMS. Second, even if you are laconic enough to squeeze each of your posts into fewer than 160 characters (not words), SMS moblogging is text-only. Third, you need to pay extra to the SMS moblog service provider. For example, Txtsolutions charges £0.10 for each message. This charge is in addition to your regular SMS fee (from your wireless operator) and cost for the blog hosting service if it applies.
Email Moblogging
If your mobile phone supports sending email or MMS, email moblogging doesn't have any of the drawbacks of SMS moblogging:
There is no practical length limitation, as long as your thumbs don't complain.
You can post photos from a camera phone, adding richness to your post.
There is no extra charge besides what you pay for the wireless data and regular blog hosting service.
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Email moblogging works in much the same way as its SMS counterpart, except that you send email from the phone to a (hopefully) secret email address. The email Inbox is polled by the moblog service at regular intervals (e.g., every five minutes). When a new message is detected, the moblog service retrieves the message and parses the content. If the moblog service supports picture attachments (most do), you can even have a mobile photo blog!
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The easiest way to set up an email-based moblog is to use a blog-hosting service that supports email posting. It typically takes only a few minutes. After you open a regular blog account at the hosting service, there is usually a field under the user preferences screen where you can set the private email address. All emails sent to this address will be posted to the blog you just opened.
Most popular blog-hosting providers now support email posting from mobile phones, either free of charge (e.g., Blogger) or with a premium paid account (e.g., LiveJournal). Figure compares several providers that emphasize moblog support.
Name and URL | Cost (USD/yr) | Photo attachment | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Blogger http://www.blogger.com | Free | N | |
LiveJournal http://www.livejournal.com | $25 | Y | Email posting option available for paid account only. Photo attachments are supported. |
TypePad http://www.typepad.com | $60 | Y | Moblogging feature available for all account types; 50MB storage and 1 GB per month bandwidth for basic subscription. |
Radio UserLand http://radio.userland.com | $40 | Y | Cost includes desktop blog software and one year of hosting. Email attachment posting requires additional software; 40MB storage. |
Besides the major blog providers, some new providers specialize in moblog hosting. Among them are Textamerica (http://www.textamerica.com) and Fotolog (http://www.fotolog.net). Both of them offer free accounts for users to blog directly from their mobile phones.
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Photo Moblogging to Any Blog Service
The aforementioned photo moblogging solutions tie you into specific bloghosting services. But in many cases, you do not want this tie-in:
You could be running your own blog server and do not use any of the blog hosting services (see "Host Your Own Mobile Photo Blog" [Hack #57] for more on this subject).
Your favorite blog host might not provide photo moblogging features.
You might not want to pay the extra money to add photo moblogging support.
Is there a service that is free and independent of your blog server? As it turns out there is, and it's called Flickr.
Flickr (http://www.flickr.com) started out as a photo storage provider. The one feature that makes Flickr really interesting from a moblog point of view is that it allows you to upload photos (to Flickr) by email and create a blog entry at your designated blog site. The blog site can be any of the blog hosts mentioned in the previous section, or even your own web site running popular blog server software.
The post includes the email content as its main body and an inline thumbnail, which is linked to the picture stored on Flickr. The thumbnail posting feature in Flickr is really cool and sets it apart from other services, especially if you have a camera phone that produces megapixel pictures. Without resizing to thumbnails, megapixel pictures would clutter up your blog and mess up the web page layout (e.g., sidebars, etc.).
The free account at Flickr allows you to upload up to 20 MB of photos per month. A subscription fee of $24.95 per year will push the quota to 2 GB per month. Considering most (mobile phone) moblog attachments are smaller than 100 KB, the free Flickr account is more than sufficient for even the most aggressive mobloggers. Combining the Flickr email posting service with a free blog-hosting service (or your own blog server), you can set up a powerful and free moblog with photo posting in no time!
Figure shows the information Flickr needs to post to your blog site on your behalf. Obviously, it needs to know your site address and account credentials.
Confirming URL and account credentials of your blog site
Figure shows the private posting email addresses Flickr provides to you when you open an account. One address is for adding pictures to your Flickr account, and the other is for adding the pictures and then posting thumbnails to the designated blog.
The free email address Flickr provides for each account to post blog entries and pictures
3.1 Smart client for Flickr.
The default email application on some Nokia phones restricts the size of an attachment to a maximum of 100 KB. To get around this limitation and to provide a more integrated user experience, you can use a phone application that takes pictures and then automatically posts them to Flickr without having to switch applications and enter email addresses.
"Manoj TK" wrote a little open source J2ME program that does just that. You can download it from https://sourceforge.net/projects/moblogger2/.To learn how the program works, please refer to http://manojtk.blogspot.com/2005/01/smtp-email-attachments-from-nokia-6600.html.
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