the newts.net

Gaz sees the funny side of things after the engine management light comes on and the Saab limps onto the A1 hard shoulder. After a 2 hour wait for thr AA to arrive it turns out that Cockus has run out of petrol!

In his defence though, the Saab info panel was saying Distance to Empty: 24 Miles.

Lesson learnt!

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The sun is out, the sky is blue, there’s not a cloud to spoil the view, but it’s… a 4 hour delay at work so we’re sightseeing at Brighton marina!

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It’s nice to to be at work in the sunsoaked capital, and as you can see, work is bustling along at break-neck speed!

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***BREAKING NEWS***
Gaz seen working!

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Moblog is a blend of the words mobile and weblog. A mobile weblog, or moblog, consists of content posted to the Internet from a mobile phone. Moblogs generally involve technology which allows publishing from a mobile device, and by their mobile nature, mean a website or blog can be updated ‘live, from the field’, or the bed, or the car, or the train, or the office, or the pub etc etc, basically anywhere you’ve got your mobile phone, you can update your website. You get the idea, and so did I. And what with the arrival of my noveau 3.15megapixel NOKIA N80 Camera Phone, Moblogging is a feature I wanted at my disposal!

The theory’s simple, implementing it in practice however proved to be a little more difficult. Even though the php code to allow posting by email is written into the wordpress software, there’s more to it than meets the eye. Firstly you need to set up a specialist email account that your blog can check for new emails. Obviously this has to be an obscure address that someone isn’t going to send an email to by accident as their email will appear as a post on the website.

Next you have to consider how an image attached to the mail is going to appear in the post. The inbuilt wordpress ‘writing by email’ doesnt account for this, but I was saved a huge amount of work here by installing the very handy wordpress plugin ‘Postie’, which is configurable and handles where images and files emailed to the special email account are stored and displayed in the post.

Next once you’ve got Postie configured with your secret email account settings, all configured up for displaying images and comunicating with wordpress, you can send a test email to check all’s well. But that’s not quite the job done. As it stands the site will look for a new email and post it along with any pictures ONLY when you log into a browser and tell it to do so. While this would still be a quality feature to have, it somewhat defeats the object of MOBILE blogging. So to get round this and fully automate the moblog process you need to set up a CRON job. In layman’s terms it’s a way of scheduling your website to carry out a command periodically. In this case an instruction that tells your website to go look for any new emails every few minutes.

FINALLY, once the cron was up and running, the moblog feature was up, running and working a treat. I added a new category to the website called ‘Moblog’, and by default all posts that I make from my mobile phone will be filed under it.

So I’m looking forward to capturing a few more ‘off the cuff’ and informal, as-it-happens pictures, and writing a few posts the minute inspiration or the urge dictates. Just another angle to the newts.net, and another reason to finger my mobile ;0)

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