It’s a topic I read about almost every day, but so far i have barely experimented with mobile publishing. I can see the benefits, but in practice it’s too long winded and cumbersome to use for everyday publishing.
In the past i’ve made a few posts on the QueensSpeech blog using the normal Blogger interface on my old BlackBerry 8700. It worked, but the experience was less than pleasurable. Now that i’ve moved The Social Publishing Blog to WordPress and have just acquired a BlackBerry Pearl, I thought I’d give it another go.
Generally the process should work like this:
1. Type text in mobile phone
2. Email text to secret email address
3. Wait for the cron job on the WordPress server to convert the email into a new blog post.
So far i’ve experienced two problems that have prevented the above from working smoothly.
Firstly, my hosting company’s cron job won’t automatically process php specific commands. This means I have to manually activate the email to blog conversion process using my copy of Opera Mini.
Secondly, if I type my text using the ‘Notes’ tool on the Pearl, rather that the dedicated BlackBerry email software, the text becomes garbled when it gets imported into WordPress.
I may sound like I’m complaining, which I probably am, but overall I’m beginning to enjoy mobile publishing. I love my Pearl, and now that Opera Mini works on the BlackBerry I don’t have to use the locked down web browser that came with the phone.
Anyway, things must be alright, this is the second mobile post i’ve made in the same day! Move out of the way Twitter…