Blogging

I’m headed to Thailand for the next several weeks and so I’ve been looking for an easy way to blog from my iPhone or iPad.  I am using Movable Type which these days doesn’t seem to have as much support as WordPress so the options are more limited.  I can access Movable Type admin pages through Safari, but I found that it did not really work well at all.

The first thing I tried is a Movable Type plugin called iMT.  iMT is simple to install and creates an iPhone formatted admin page.  The interface is nice, but of limited functionality.  You can’t add photos to your entry.

Flickr provides an easy solution to this with its blog integration. By linking your blog to Flickr, you get an email address where you can send pictures that Flickr automatically converts into a blog entry.  The subject becomes the title and the body and picture becomes your entry.  It worked great, but is designed for single photo entries.  If you send multiple pictures in the same email you get multiple entries.  One for each picture.

I found my solution with the iPhone/iPad App BlogPress.  BlogPress has everything that I need to moblie blog.  I like it because there’s an offline mode where you can write your entry and then upload it when you have an internet connection.  Photos are easy to add to your entry.  Simply select them from your album and they appear in your entry.  When you’re finished, the photos are automatically uploaded to your site, Flickr, or Picasa, and are embedded into your entry.

It will even upload videos to YouTube for incorporation into your blog.

I only tested BlogPress with Movable Type, but it works with all the major content management systems out there.

I highly recommend BlogPress and I know that it will change how I blog on the move.

Advertising Age: Inside Seth Godin’s Blogging Philosophy

One reason I encourage people to blog is that the act of doing it stretches your available vocabulary and hones a new voice. You won’t get it for a while, but you’ll get it. To one person who wrote in and said he didn’t think he had anything interesting to say, I asked him whether he was boring in person too? Boring at breakfast? Boring on a date? That boring?! Probably not.

An interesting interview of Seth Godin.  But, I tend to find anything that Seth Godin has to say interesting.  Thanks to Chris for sending me the link.

Just upgraded my blog to MovableType 4.25.  I’ve always wondered if I made the correct choice choosing Movable Type over WordPress when switching my blog over from Blogger.  I have an installation of WordPress that I started playing with, but I’ve gotten so used to Movable Type, that I’m not sure if I want to bother with changing.  But, I might as well check out to see what I might be missing!

I was looking at the blog to see if my last article published correctly and I heard a really bad  sounding version “Jingle Bells” with a buzzing sound after every musical phrase.  I thought it must have been a pop up window from some other page, but no.  The offensive sound was coming from my blog.

It was the “Jeep” Google Adsense ad in the right column of my blog.  I am really annoyed with Google for having ads with sound and not giving you the option of turning the volume off.  There doesn’t seem to be a way these ads without turning off all image ads.

I can see this annoying people to the extent that they stop visiting my blog.  And we can’t be having that happen!