def. — mobile blog —
Happened to be researching camera phones and learned truth. The pictures portrayed in the sales pitch, which seem to appear instantly on the phone at the other end, — don’t. They must first travel to a picture-mail server where they are stored. (It would have been really cool to be talking to someone and send a picture while doing so just as the ad leads us to believe.) As an alternative, the caller can send them via email. In any case the recipient ends up doing a download to his computer or enabled phone. And, BTW, these phones are not interoperable.e.g., a Sprint phone can’t send / receive snapshot images from an AT&T customer’s phone. So, most people will end up sending these photos via the email procedure. Following the picturephoning trace it dawned on me that I could create a similar application that would retrieve images AND text and post them automatically to the web. You are reading my first moblog post. Previously, I had to go to find a browser and enter my spiel from a web page form. Now I can submit web log data from ANY email enabled device whether it be Outlook Express, HotMail, a PDA, or even pager or phone.Un-wired. Pretty kewl, eh?

The old way: Lemme tell ya the hoops to jump through to get a photograph on the web (until now). Take the shot. Wait until you get home. Connect your digital camera to your pc with USB cable and upload. Using FTP client software upload the image file to your server. Add html to your web page to display the picture and upload that. Not digital? Take film to photoservice for developing. Retrieve prints. Scan prints. etc., etc…

And how it works: I wrote CF code that checks an email address on the email server and greps any msgs found therein for posting. I include a password in my email header so that other unintended msg errata doesn’t make it to the web. When a genuine moblog is found, its content (title, body, date) is parsed and inserted in the database. When you access this web page the post dynamically renders. An email attachment file is handled the same way. If my camera phone includes an image file, the application will save it to a folder on the strombotne.com server. Easy as pie! Moblogging is the way to go.