Photomoblog is back
Thursday February 24, 2005 - Permanent link to this post -
You may have noticed the quiet return of the Photomoblog to the sidebar, an idea I tried for a while last year. Well, it's back and it's a bit better.
The previous incarnation of the Photomoblog (Photographic Mobile Weblog, for those who've not figured it out was a bit of a hack. I had set up a moblog on mobloguk.net and was just grabbing the first item from it's RSS feed. It was messy and unstable and I couldn't consistently get my phone to send emails of pictures, so it went.
Since getting my new phone (Sony Ericsson s700i) though, I've been keen to get the pictures from it straight onto Pixelicious. I've also been keen to start using the popular photo-sharing app, Flickr for a while after reading so much about it in blogosphere.
So how could I make use of my phone, Flickr and my Textpattern powered website? Jeff Bostick had the answer. Jeff's tutorial made it very quick and easy and I can now email pictures from my phone straight to Flickr, which will in turn use Chris McLoed's XML-RPC hack for Textpattern to post an entry here. I've got the Photomoblog in a section of it's own so that it doesn't interfere with the front page, and there's a link to both the full Photomoblog and also to the latest entry (see the phto in the sidebar?) on every page.
Some issues I'm currently trying to iron out:
- Currently, when the post comes in from Flickr, the image has a link back to the original Flickr entry, despite me having changed the post template on Flickr. I'd like the image (in the sidebar at least) to have a link to the full post on this website. I've sort of got it working, but at the moment I have to manually remove the Flickr link.
- At the moment the Photomoblog posts show up in my RSS feed. With all that's been written recently about separating the moblog/links/etc. from the content in RSS feeds, I'm not sure whether to continue this. As I don't read my own RSS feed, I'll open this up to the audience. RSS users, would you prefer if my Photomoblog imageswere not included in the RSS? Your replies will be gratefully received.
The Photomoblog may change format or disappear completely in coming weeks/months depending on whether it's working out or not.
