Mobiles, blogging, photos and Flickr
Okay, so if you actually read this, you may have seen a whole heap of jibberish posts over the last few days (of since I’ve removed most of them)… basically I got a new mobile phone and now I can decentley send emails/photos etc. So I’ve been trying to set up/configure moblgging over the last day or so. WordPress has posting by email functionality built in, but for some reason even though it is supposed to support attachments, whenever the content type was multipart/mixed (MIME format) it would actually output the attachment in it’s ASCII representation (according to it’s MIME representation)… so I had to look around for a plugin, and found wp-cron which seemed to do the job. Except that it requires upon someone viewing (sending a request) to the webpage, in order for it to ‘add’ the moblog, which wasn’t really what I wanted. So along came Postie – which did have additional features to wp-cron. Getting Postie to work was an effort in itself. Even though I’ve got Linux hosting, I don’t have ssh or telnet available, so i can’t schedule cron jobs, so I had to rely on wp-cron (yet again). But eventually I got it working.
Then today for some reason I decided to check out Flickr again, as I had checked it out a couple of years back (yep, according to Flickr I’m ‘old skool’) and it had facilities to moblog to Blogger (back when i was using Blogger). However what I didn’t like about free Flickr accounts back then was not that you were limited to 200 images in your photostream, but that you couldn’t access the original (or at least decent printing size versions of your pictures). I know Flickr got bought out by Yahoo sometime last year, and I was very impressed that now it keeps a Small, Medium and Large version. Previously Medium (500 x 375) use to be the largest size. At least large at (1024 x 768) is decent where a viewer wants to see the picture/image at a larger size and/or print it. And I was even more impressed when WordPress was supported. So all my time yesterday was in total waste, as Flickr now is a much better tool (and that I’m glad for). Plus it means now I can upload all my images/photos to my Flickr account which will give me more space on my hosting account for other stuff. The limit on 200 in the photostream is a bit annoying, but you can still access the images which aren’t shown in the photostream so anything you reference elsewhere won’t be broken when it disappears from the photostream. My only complaint, is that the navigation is still way warped when setting up options/configurations etc. Half the time you don’t know whether the page your going to is the right one to set some option/enable something etc.