Post to Your Blog from your Smartphone

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 9-31 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.

Instead of email, you can also use MMS to post blog entries from your camera phone. The MMS message is sent to an email address, and hence, MMS moblogging is essentially the same as email moblogging.