Tech Tuesday with BenSpark – #9

This originally appeared on FuelMyBlog’s Blog. Written by me.

This should be titled something like blog anywhere, anytime about anything. Today’s topic is mobile blogging and I am going to talk about four blogging programs that you can use to post via your mobile phone. The first is a blogging tool that most of us use or have used and that is Blogger.

Blogger has tools to allow you to blog via your mobile phone but there is some set-up involved. Blogger has a great tutorial on how to set this up. It has been a while since I set up my ability to blog from my cell phone. In fact I thought I would use it more often when I was stuck in airports and whatnot but it seems that I haven’t used it quite enough to warrant setting it up in the first place. However this service has helped me on more than one occasion.

Being able to blog through my mobile phone has helped me keep certain deadlines and restrictions that I have placed upon myself in regards to my Photo-A-Day project. I have been taking a Photo-A-Day now for 829 consecutive days. And I have a rule that the photo has to be taken each day and uploaded to my blog that same day too. But what would happen if I was somewhere without Internet access, well I had my camera phone as a backup. And with my camera phone I could snap the picture, give it a title, write up a little something in the body of the post push a button and Whoosh, it flies over the cell service and lands smack dab on my blog.

Setting up mobile blogging for blogger is the most involved of the four programs I will talk about. Luckily there is an easy to follow Tutorial that you can use to make this work.

First you send a message via MMS to go@blogger.com you will get a message back with your a code. This is a token code and you use that to claim your token for your blog. Once that is done Blogger automatically sets up a mobile blogging blog for you. However you can link that blog to an existing blog so that new blog posts that you make go directly to the blog that you choose. I don’t think you can do this to multiple blogs on Blogger however, which is a bummer because I would love to post photos on the fly while I am out on the water kayaking.

The Tutorial on blogger will guide you thought the rest of the nuances of this feature. It is very simple to set up.

Here is my latest blog post via my cell phone to BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo. If you didn’t realize it, I need a better camera on my phone. This image stinks. But I am also able to put the SD card from my camera into my mobile phone and send that image to a post with my mobile phone. I am using a Treo 650 phone that I got specifically so that I could text my wife and do mobile blogging. Make sure that you check with your carrier first to see about data usage and other hidden charges before mobile blogging. I got nailed in my first month because of the data plan I had (I do not have an Internet plan and Treo’s are different than other Verizon phones and once they go online at all they stay there, so I got walloped on charges that I fought and got most of the money back. So check your plans and make sure your phone has MMS.)

The next two programs are for posting photos directly to your Flickr and Buzznet accounts. These are photo hosting accounts and each provide you with e-mail addresses that you can use to send new pictures to your account.

For Buzznet you need to click Settings and then under the header Make a Post click Post From Email. This will show you a box with the email address that you will use to send photos to your Buzznet account. All photos sent this way appear in your default photo collection. You can edit your photo later to put it in another directory. Here is an image I uploaded via my camera phone. Since each photo is so awful I named my folder Craptastic Treo Images.

Craptastic image of Duncan on the Door

You can also email photos to your Flickr account. And you can also have those images automatically post to your blog as well. You will have two separate addresses that you will use to post photos, one will post just to Flickr, the other Will post to Flickr as well as to your blog.

First the address for your Flickr Account, you can find this by starting at you home page on Flickr. From there you will click on the link to uploading tools. You should see a paragraph on the right hand side titled Upload by E-mail. Click that and you will then go to the page that will give you your Flickr email address. With that you can upload photos via e-mail or through MMS on your camera phone. The subject becomes the title of the post, the image is what you attach and then the body of your message becomes the content of the post.

Here is the photo I uploaded directly to Flickr.

Experiment from Mobile Phone

Here is a photo I uploaded to Flickr and had automatically post to my blog. This is taking some time because I uploaded a large file through the phone, hope I don’t get nailed on charges again. I will post this and the link as soon as I get that up. The cool thing about this is that if you have multiple blogs you can get a special email address for each of your blogs. This is one of the best ways to get photos automatically added to your blogs.

Tech Tuesday with BenSpark Experiment

Here is the photo I wanted to post originally but had to take at a lower resolution.

Tech Tuesday Test Post

One thing I learned about sending images that were taken by a full fledged digital camera by popping the SD card from my Canon SD80 and putting it into my Treo 650 is that I can’t send a huge image. First I need to change the qu
ality and size of the image and then try to send the message and image together. So here is my second attempt to send a photo that originated on my Canon Camera to Flickr and have it automatically post to one of my blogs.

And those photos and post text automatically posted to my blog at The BenSpark and also as 2nd Tech Tuesday Test. As far as the one that I took with my Canon Digital Camera and then sent, it is still in my inbox so if it actually gets sent sometime I will add links to that as well. I need to get a better camera phone. But my contract is up in January so I have to wait. A qwerty keyboard is also important.

And another blog tool that you can use to do mobile blogging is Twitter. This is easy. You set up a Twitter account, then click settings and choose Phone & IM. Once you put in your mobile phone number you send a message to twitter and the number that they give you. Send a message through SMS (not MMS) and the text message you send gets posted to your Twitter account.

Just a couple more tools to use to enhance your blogging life. If you have other mobile blogging tools that you use let me know.

BenSpark Writes four blogs, is an avid kayaker and a Transformers fan, he also takes at least one photo every single day and posts it to his BenSpark Blog. You can visit him at The BenSpark, BenSpark 2: Electric Boogaloo, Flatwater Tech or The Wired Kayaker.

3 thoughts on “Tech Tuesday with BenSpark – #9”

  1. Hi! I want to ask if you will provide a link back to my site OR link exchange?
    Why? because web sites that are linked from lots of other sites are often deemed more popular and get a higher ranking in search results.
    Put a back link to my blog, contact me and I will so the same.
    Contact me: alexvorn2@gmal.com or post a comment in my blog:
    Tech Gadget Blog
    The best!

  2. Someone on PPP forums was asking about this so I’m going to post a link to this over there.

  3. Alex, I added your link.

    Karen, thanks for distributing this link ton the PPP Forums.

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