|
MObile weB LOGGING - how to post your thoughts, news
and images to the Internet in seconds from your Nokia Communicator (or
S60 smartphone or Psion palmtop).
Blogging is a great way to both share your thoughts and
post your news to the Internet at large, perhaps to friends, family or
even complete strangers, without having the hassle of making up HTML
pages and messing around with FTP to upload them to a web site.
And now, in 2006, you can even post your photos and
videos as well (bandwidth permitting). But how much will it cost, how
do you actually get started, and what do you have to do to make a new
post to your blog from your Communicator (or S60 smartphone or
connected palmtop)?
How much does it cost?
Absolutely nothing. It's true that there are paid-for
blogging hosts (e.g. TypePad),
but it's equally easy to use one of the free services, such as the
Google-owned Blogger.
For photo-focussed blogging (photo-blogging), perhaps
use the free UK service Moblog.co.uk.
How do I get started?
You'll need to use your desktop computer to set up your
free account with either of the two services above, setting the look
and feel of your blog. For Blogger, once set up, you'll need to go into
your blog 'Settings | Email' and set up a 'Mail-to-Blogger' email
address that can be used to post your blog entries to. This will be of
the form [email protected]. For Moblog.co.uk, the
address to email to is simply [email protected].
Whichever service you go for (depending on whether you
mainly want to post text or images), set up the posting email address
in your Contacts, so that you don't have to remember it or type it each
time you post anything.
Making a new blog post
The huge, massive advantage of using blog hosts that
accept posts by email is that you can send them easily from your mobile
device, without having to struggle with Javascript-heavy posting web
forms.
Blogger: Essentially, you pick the blog email
address from your Contacts as the recipient and then write an email as
normal. The subject of the email becomes the title of the blog post and
the body text forms the main part of the post.
Moblog.co.uk: Because photo blogging is driven by
the images you take, you'll usually start a new post from within Images
on your Communicator (Gallery, on S60 devices). Just pick the one you
want and use 'Send via email', choosing the 'Recipient' from your
Contacts store and filling in the subject and body text as above.
(If bandwidth is a problem and you want to keep
your GPRS bill down, you could always resize or crop the image.
On the Communicator, use 'Save as', using lower JPG compression, and
then sending the new image instead. On S60 smartphones, use the
shareware PhotoFix
first, perhaps downsampling your megapixel image to a 640x480 pixel
version with higher compression and saving with a new filename, perfect
for emailing in to your photo-blog.)
The blog email can go off with your usual 'Send/retrieve
email' cycle, or you can send immediately by switching to your Outbox
and using 'Send now'. Within a few minutes, your wit, wisdom and
photographic artistry will be up on the Internet for everyone to wonder
at!
Examples
AAS's Ewan has a good text blog. And I've started
a photo blog.
|
