I absolutely love being given challenges. So was totally pleased when Alice Mercer sent me a message in twitter asking how to write blog posts to her Edublogs blog using her mobile phone. Fortunately I had lots of ideas on “how to” but I hadn’t gotten around to testing them.
Posterous.com
My first thought was posterous.com because it can be used with any mobile device provided you can write and send emails.
All you have to do is:
- Set up an account at posterous.com
- Next link all the accounts you want to post to automatically when you send an email to posterous. For example you can set it to automatically post to your blog, Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr.
- Now whenever you write an email on your mobile phone and send it to post.posterous.com the contents of the email are immediately posted to all sites you linked to your posterous account.
- Alternatively you can control where it is posted to by altering the email address. For example emails sent to [email protected] will post the contents to your blog while [email protected] will post to your flickr account.
- You can also attach photos, Doc, PDF, mp3, PPT with your text and it will be inserted into your blog post.
Here is a post I wrote using Posterous with a photo attached while I waited for my son to finish guitar practice. Apparently if I had used the correct URL it would have changed them to links — I will have to try that next time. Obviously it can’t add tags or categories so you would need to add these later.
WordPress For iPhone
Now if you have an iPhone or iTouch I would recommend you use WordPress for iPhone which you can download for free from the App Store. This application provides more editing control plus you can add tags and categories to posts. Watch this video to check it out in more detail.
FINAL THOUGHT
There are quite a few tools that you can use for writing and/or creating audio posts using mobile devices. Would love to hear more about the one(s) you’ve tried and whether you liked/disliked using them.
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@slcs no problem I think posterous is an excellent option and as you say great for cross posting.
Super groovilicious Sue! Posterous is a great add-on site to post via email. I also like the cross posting capabilities. Thanks for pointing me that way.
@John I’m with you on mobile phones — happily live without the need for anyone to call me. My hubby finds it hard to understand why I don’t want to call people on the phone. Being able to access the Internet when I’m out is the main reason why I have the iphone and hope to use it more for sending images and blog posts.
Nice post and something I shall need to experiment with when I finally get around to buying a new mobile phone. It has been more than a year since I passed my phone to my wife after her phone bit the dust. Haven’t missed it really. It drove me insane in Singapore. Calls 24/7 up there.
Was hanging out for an iPhone. Usage is too expensive. Will hang out a little longer.
Cheers, John.
@Mr Williams I totally love my iphone (and I’m not into mobile phones). I’ll probably use it mostly with my personal blog.
I really want to use Jott but you can’t from Australia unfortunately.
@BlogWalker (Gail) I had thought about it from the convenience factor but hadn’t thought about the students. Excellent point. Especially as there is a range of different tools you can use from your mobile phone including creating audio posts.
I think the writing aspect will become easier as more people get iphones. While the iphone keypad is slow for me it is absolutely amazing and I can’t say enough about how great it is. Worth every cent I paid.
@Brendan I’m like you and it takes me time to think about what to write. But I can see lots of ways you can use it to write really quick posts to share with people especially if you want to add photos.
@Alice Mercer Any time. Please send me more to investigate. I had so much fun checking it all out. I’m planning to use this method a lot more for my personal blog for those occasions when I’m filling in time.
Thank you Sue! This is good to have some options, since I was limited to posting to tumblr before you came up with this solution. Since I have web email, I’m not limited in size to 140 characters. And Brendan, one thing I do now with txt for posts to tumblr sometimes, is to type, and safe the message as a draft on my phone. That might be helpful.
Thanks for the post. I tend to travel a lot and an alternative way to post would be nice.
I don’t know though most of my posts take forever to percolate through my brain and onto the paper (er screen) I couldn’t imagine writing an entire post on a cell phone.
Sue, this is such an important option to have available! For teachers, of course, there is the convenience factor of being able to blog whenever we can grab a free moment, which might not be at the same time that we have access to a computer.
But for many of our students – those who do not have a computer with Internet access at home – but do have a cell phone – this is a huge equalizer!
Last week, I had a middle school teacher in my Edublogs workshop raise the equity of access issue. At his school, there is some after school access to computers in the library. But what kid wouldn’t prefer to blog via his/her cell as opposed to staying after school.
And, hey, what about the teachers who want their students to blog during class time, but have no access to the computer lab. Even at our poorest sites, our students seem to have cell phones (even if they are banned during school hours).
Thanks for the update, Sue (and thanks, Alice, for posting the question). I’ve been considering buying an iPhone, but will test out Posterous today on my Verizon cell.
WordPress for iPhone works great. I haven’t used it on my edublogs site yet, but did set it up so that I could. I’ve used it for a mobile photos blog.
If you would like to do really short updates, Jott (http://www.jott.com) can be set up to update an edublog. With that you don’t even have to type. You just talk and it transcribes your voice into text.