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The Nokia N93 cell phone, Nokia N800 ultra-mobile PC, and the Nokia bluetooth keyboard SU-8W.

Frequent readers of this blog might know that I am on the road quite a lot. In the last 12 months, I have been to Bay St. Louis, Chicago, Washington D.C., New York, Nashville, Fort Myers x2, Spokane, Cleveland, and Cincinnati. I often blog from the road and usually used my Apple Powerbook. However, that usually involved my carrying the laptop, digital camera, chargers (110 volt & 12 volt), adapter cables, and more. If you have ever walked the distance from the U.S. capitol to Lincoln Memorial in 95 degree heat with a 25 pound bag on your shoulder, you know that this is not something that you’d want to do very often. Well, I’ve done it far too often and therefore am very happy with the current setup:

The Nokia N93 cell phone, Nokia N800 ultra-mobile PC, and the Nokia bluetooth keyboard SU-8W.

In this how-to, I am showing you how to update your blog when you’re on the move. I am using Wordpress to run my blog, but you can substitute the word ‘Wordpress’ in this how-to with Blogger, Vox, TypePad, Movable Type, and a variety of other engines. So, no worries.

You see, I am not sure if you already have a blog, but this would be somewhat necessary for moblogging. I personally use WordPress, I mostly like it. There is also Wordpress.com if you don’t have your own webserver. I have listed some of the other services out there, and most of them should be fine - it all depends on what you really want and how much need for customization you have. Places like wordpress.com, vox, typepad, and blogger offer you limited customizability but get you hooked up with a webspace for cheap. Wordpress, Movable Type, and others give you the blogging engine but you need to have your own webspace and some knowledge of installation procedure (no biggie, though). For the sake of this how-to, I am going to be using my standard installation of Wordpress.

What is flickr, you might ask? Flickr is an online photo album, but a cool one. If you’re still using some funky stuff like Yahoo! Photos, go get flickr. The people at Yahoo! must have really hated their own online photo album service because they bought flickr. I’ve been a user since 2004 and love it. Most of my pictures are stored there.
You have a choice between a free account or a $25 a year account. The difference is in the amount you can upload per month. Flickr does not have a limit as to how much you can store on your account but how much you can upload. Once you’ve gotten flickr to do the stuff you want it to do, proceed by setting up your blog inside flickr.

Flickr is pre-configured for a variety of blog types:

Go through the entire setup process and have flickr post a test post. That way you know that everything works.

Once flickr is setup for email uploading you can use your phone’s built-in email function to send the images directly to flickr. As you can see in the image, there are two email addresses for uploading - a long one and a shorter one. The longer one is for upload to flickr and your blog at the same time. The shorter one only uploads to flickr. If you want to upload an image and some text to your blog, just use the longer email and your blog is always up-to-date.

I have also styled my auto-post to the blog from flickr because I didn’t like the way it uploaded the images:






You might want to consider the same for your blog, especially if your CSS is customized.

Ok, so now that you’ve set up flickr, you can upload images directly from your cell phone or the Nokia N800 (or any device that has email capability). The nice thing here is the fact that the subject line of your email to flickr is going to end up as the title for your blog post, then the image will be displayed and any text that you might have put into your email is also going to appear as the text of your blog entry.

In the real world, a mobile blog post looks like the one on the right - and is completely indistinguishable from a post that you might have written at home on your desktop.

So, how does the Nokia N93 and the Nokia N800 come into play? Easy!

Nokia is marketing these devices as - rightfully so - multimedia computers. I’ve had the N93 for almost a year now, the N800 for about 5 days. My N93 is a 3G (UMTS) phone but doesn’t support the frequencies here in the US, so I am limited to EDGE networking. No big deal usually, but uploading one of the images through my cell phone network takes a few minutes. The N93 also has a built-in 802.11 wireless adapter and can connect to any wireless network in the area. Often, I sent a quick image and some text to my blog just as a brief update. The Nokia N93 also has a built-in flickr application that makes uploading (supposedly) easier. I don’t really like the application, so I’m sticking to the method that I outlined in this post.

The Nokia N800 is a nice complement to the N93 - I am using the N93’s cellular internet by connecting the Nokia N800 to via bluetooth. Now, I can browse the internet using my cell phone data plan and have the added benefit of a larger screen. It makes posting on my blog a snap. The N800 also connects to 802.11 networks and allows me to access my blog’s dashboard through the N800’s browser at much faster speeds than my phone’s EDGE connection. In the long run it might be superfluous to bring both devices with me. It would be nice to see the addition of a high-quality digital camera in the N800’s successor.

I typically only carry my cell phone with me, but since getting the N800, I have often carried both. We’ve been driving a bit here and I was able to browse the web while Sonja was behind the wheel. The same was true for her, when I was driving. Naturally the combination of N93 and N800 also allows me to surf while chilling on the beach or while waiting for Sonja to finish trying on clothes at the department store.

I am still discovering the N800 for myself, but I hope that these posts are giving you an idea of the potential this combination has for bloggers on the move.