RunKeeper Pro 1.5.0.7

Tweetie 1.3.2

WordPress 1.3

Downloading All…

Twitterlike post…

Grabbing a late lunch and testing a blog post via email. Early this morning I finally set up a cron to check for posts via email.

This post traveled from a Blackberry Bold to Gmail, then the cron ran and the email was pulled by Postie and imported as a post.

Along the way, I ran in to the following problems: – Postie Gmail support – Hosting provider had outgoing ports 993 and 995 blocked – Cronless Postie vs standard (now running cron rev)

Over the weekend I created two blogs for my parents, Heartsong Studios and Earthsea Pottery. I’ve used my own hosted server for sites in the past (and do with solyoung.com). I used WordPress as the host this time… Their distributed servers and pricepoint (free.99 + $10 for DNS name server hosting) is better and cheaper than a personally hosted solution.

Each site, soup-to-nuts took less than six hours and were fun weekend projects. The blogs themselves took less than an hour, really, with image editing for Earthsea and the audio cleanup for Heartsong taking the real time.

I need the ability to modify the source of my solyoung.com blog, but if you’re looking for a clean and hosted solution that lets you personalize, WordPress was a good experience.

Twitter Tools, a WordPress plugin by Alex King, blew up my blog last night. For those of you following my RSS or Twitter updates, this meant you got 45 copies of a weekly Twitter update (and you would have gotten 8 more that were in the queue to be published if I hadn’t caught it and shut it off – thanks @evantravers for the RSS heads up).

I like Twitter Tools very much. It’s the first WordPress Twitter integration I used, and it’s still my preferred way to go. It automatically sends a tweet when I write a new blog entry. A good, clean, way to let people know you wrote something you’d like them to check out. I used to use it for a list of my more recent tweets, but I’ve replaced that with a FriendFeed plugin.

In one of Twitter Tools more recent versions the feature of weekly digest posts of one’s tweets was added. I wasn’t hot on the idea of a daily digest since it would be too often and would ultimately just be a daily barf of one’s tweets and wouldn’t involve actual thought. The weekly was worth checking out so I played around with the settings (above pic).

If the setting for “Create a weekly digest…” is Yes, you are given a choice of day and time for your post. During my trial of the settings, I chose 11:59pm on Sunday night.

This was last week. I’d forgotten about it. This morning however, it blew up with the 45 posts. Pretty ugly bug!

An impressive bit about this post is that I’m using the web version of WordPress. There are no apps as of yet for blogging on a G1. This is the first time I’ve been able to use the web based rev of WordPress on a mobile device, so this has been farely impressive. The image inserted above is via a Flickr feed plugin. It worked, but not seamlessly.

Today’s impression of the G1, soley from the power of its web browser, is less negative. I will say however that I plugged the G1 in to the official Device Success Wife-o-Meter and the needle barely lifted. I didn’t tell her it was the Google Phone before asking her to check it out. Here’s how that went (continued after the updates…):

UPDATE: T-Mobile botched up my Internet plan somewhere between the time of getting 1/2 way done with this post and the time of clicking the “Publish” button. When I finally published I received a message about not having the appropriate data plan for the G1. You can probably imagine the color tones of my face turning bright reddish-purple with rage.

UPDATE 2: Wasn’t able to recover the text from the post, but the following is close, re-written…

Seems a little fragile. Kind of blocky and big.

She played with it for a little while, trying the flip screen and browsing to different sites. YouTube popped up automatically for her. Still, the result was a definite ho-hum run.

Ok, so what about the Google Phone? I thought you were going to be reviewing it.

“That is the Google Phone…”

I thought the Google Phone would have more colors.

UPDATE 3: I’ve cancelled my second line on T-Mobile and upgraded to the G1′s official data plan on my primary line. The failure with the post was a case of terrible timing, where T-Mobile took 2 days to determine I was on the wrong data plan (I had no idea I needed to be on a special G1 plan). The T-Mobile network shut my line off at the worst possible time for a blogger – moments before publishing.

.

For WordPress bloggers with iPhones, the iPhone WordPress application is close to the best gift since receiving a Nintendo Entertainment System for Christmas in 1983. The application is solid, allows tags and categories, posts pictures direct from the phone, etc. Awesome!

But what if you want to post pics from your Flickr stream? What if you’re shooting with another camera and want to post high quality photos not taken with the iPhone crackerjack cam? Here’s the instructions, including detailed pictures, on how I get photos from Flickr in to an iPhone WordPress blog post:

note: you can ignore 1/2 of the steps if you already know how to use WordPress and Exposure on your iPhone.

1. Get the WordPress app (Utilities section of the App Store).

2. Get the Exposure app (Social Networking section of the App Store).

3. Open Exposure and locate the desired picture or pictures in your photostream, as seen below.

4. Click the small right-pointing arrow, you will now see the image below.

5. Click the small arrow in the top right corner to see your Share Photo options.

6. Open in Safari, and Safari will open, as seen below.

7. To save the image, press and hold your fingertip on the image. Selecting Save Image will save the image to your Camera Roll on the iPhone. You now have your image.

8. Open WordPress and create a new blog post.

9. Select the Photos tab and click the “+” button at the bottom right.

10. Choose to Add Photo from Library.

11. Click the Save button in the top right – When you post, your photo will be appended at the end of your post (below image was pulled from Exposure/Flickr/Camera Roll exactly as described above).

It’s a great new world when we can blog and participate, without limitation, from a pocketable handset.

The pic is a snap of my N82 here at a diner over lunch.