Ugh! I want to moblog from Provence (I’m going tomorrow! Yay!) and none of the options are quite working.

  • Email to Flickr which posts to this (WordPress-powered) blog: This kind of works, but no title gets sent, well, no words at all, really. I like words.
  • Email to Flickr which posts to a newly created Blogger blog: This works better. The layout’s better, the title tag works, but still no OTHER words. I like words.
  • MMS to weblogg.no: This seemed promising, since it’s set up by a Norwegian company and is specific to Norwegian ways of using technology – MMSes are great, really easy, free on weekends… But after just having set up a new blog on Blogger.com I was really frustrated. The interface is jumbled in Firefox, and really needs some work in terms of user-friendliness. There are lots of very small letters and a lot of buttons and NO HELP FUNCTION! Once you’re in there and you try to post something it tells you you can’t until you’ve set up categories, which really seems rather complex for a fresh blogger. The explanation of how to SMS or MMS posts is not in the interface you see after creating a new post, but at the bottom of the front page, and it’s ambiguous, too. When I MMSed a photo and the code word “blogg” and some text to the number given, I got an error message that I hadn’t set up a default category. But as far as I can see, I have. So I think I’m giving up on weblogg.no for now, though I’m kind of loathe to – I know how much easier it is to criticise than to create, and I really appreciate that there’s a Norwegian option now, but I’m totally spoilt by lovely interfaces. Using this made me squirm with delight to return to the elegant simplicity of the interface to Blogger.
  • Email to buzznet.com: This works, and I set up my own “moblog” pretty easily, and both words and image came through, but it’s so ugly and overloaded with stuff.
  • WordPress also supports posting through email, but you need your own mail server, and I don’t have one.

Any suggestions? I’d really like to be able to post images to a blog while I’m in Provence… There is a computer, there, but it’s under the stairs, it costs a euro for ten minutes, there’s usually a queue, and really, I don’t want to sit there when I could sit outside and chat. If I can’t work anything else out, I expect I’ll post through Flickr from my phone (best way to get the photos out) and come add some words now and then from the computer.

6 thoughts on “setting up moblogging is not a cinch

  1. I’ll give you an email account on brokenclay to use with WordPress’s email blogging feature, if you’d like.

  2. Jill

    Oh thanks! But doesn’t the email account have to be on the same server as I’m running my WordPress install on?

  3. Hmmm…maybe you’re right. Let me try it out.

  4. Katja

    It doesn’t seem to matter where the email account is, as long as it’s a pop account. The tricky part is that you have to force WordPress to check the account by running wp-mail.php. So if you don’t have web access, you can’t publish by email till you get back, unless you can set up a chron job. It also doesn’t seem to handle HTML tags right: Testing blogging by email.

  5. Jill

    Hm. Well, thanks for checking it out! I won’t have time now (plane’s leaving soon!) but maybe later? 🙂

  6. mark

    Its so hard to get things to work when you are in a hurry. Relax and enjoy your vacation 🙂

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