jennarmour | the fourth dimension

I was doing my daily twittering yesterday and came across Jim MacMillan’s practice of photoblogging using his iPhone + Twitter + TwitterFon. For whatever reason I have to say this: I have never owned a PeeCee and have been a Mac owner for over 13 years but i have a blackberry instead of an iPhone. It causes me a strange amount of grief when some of my non-technical, peecee owning friends start bragging to me about their iPhone. I smile and inwardly defend my Blackberry saying to myself “I like hitting buttons as opposed to tapping a screen”.

Nevertheless I know that when my BB has had its day i will switch over to the first brand i ever fell in love with: Apple. The second is Volkswagen. I am a very brand loyal person.

Back to the original reason for this post. Is there an equavalent to TwitterFon for the BB?

Here is what i did with wordpress and plugin’s to be able to do what i wanted: which is post images from my phone to TwitPic and also to my blog.

All that i needed to do was feed TwitPic rss to my sidebar. So i tried was a combination of SimplePie and RSS Image Widget Plugin which uses PHPThumb. I couldn’t get phpThumb to output the enclosure link to the image from TwitPic. I kept getting a bad image url.

On to the next solution: fmoblog plugin. What it does is allow you to send images from your cell phone and post them to your wordpress blog. It posts the image with a title and description. Working on customizing the display to add a timestamp and comments to each photo. Just a side note: the author of this extension is no longer supporting it. I like how the extension displays with archives. I also added most recent images to the sidebar using the text widget:

< ?php fmoblog_get_latest(); ?>

Thumbnail width is specified in settings/fmoblog. You will also need to have runPHP installed and runPHP for this to work. I still want to integrate TwitPic somehow and am going to continue working on a solution. Not sure why it is so difficult to grab images from a feed in wordpress.

Other wordpress extentions i came across while working on this was Moblog widget which displays most recent image from your twitter time-line so if you post image (with/without text) onto twitter, the widget automatically pulls its image and display at your blog’s sidebar with fancy frames. I got a few errors and pictures weren’t displaying. I think it was because it was interacting badly with some other installed plugins.

While this isn’t perfect it will do for now until i find workarounds.

Related Useful Articles on this topic

Why Flickr and Picasa blow.

Photoblogging and Wordpress Roundup