Updates make my day. Today three favorite apps had updates released. It’s like lifting your cards in poker and seeing three aces.
RunKeeper Pro 1.5.0.7
Tweetie 1.3.2
WordPress 1.3
Downloading All…
Category: WordPress
WordPress
Lunchtime mobile test post, nothing but water to see here…
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)
A couple WordPress blogs over the weekend
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
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!
Writing a Post From the Google Phone
This post will be written entirely from a Google Phone (aka T-Mobile G1) while in transit on a train to Philadelphia. I’ve mostly expressed a dislike for the G1, for mostly good reasons, but so far this post has been uneventful.
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.