It was only a matter of time -- okay, about 24 hours since I first got the idea -- but I've figured out a way to post photos from my camera phone in near-real time onto this blog.
About an hour ago I discovered a great free resource called Phlog.net. This website allows anyone to set up an account for hosting their own photo blog. Once you've got your account set up, you then email a photo to your own private email box at phlog.net. The site then processes your email, posting it on your photo blog page (here's my page), using the email title as the title of the phlog entry, the email body as the description, and the photo attachment as the photo being displayed.
As I began to play with the site I thought to myself, now if this site only had an RSS feed. Then lo and behold, I saw a little tidbit from phlog.net's designer saying that anyone who's use the site to host their photo blog could simply put /rss.xml at the end of their webpage and find an RSS feed for it. For example, my page is located at http://www.phlog.net/user/acarvin, so the RSS feed can be found at http://www.phlog.net/user/acarvin/rss.xml. Once I knew this, I was able to go to Feedroll.com and create a script for displaying my RSS feed here on this blog.
So, if you take a look at the left column of this blog's homepage, you'll now see a new entry called MobilePhlog, with a list of photo titles below it. These are the pictures I've taken with my Treo smartphone and emailed to phlog.net. In other words, every time I take a picture with my camera phone, I can get it posted to the blog in a matter of minutes. It's not as integrated into the text of the blog as I would like, but it's a really cool start if you ask me. So, stay tuned for more photos from my mobile phone to appear here on my blog. Whether or not they'll be worth looking at remains to be seen, but it's still a pretty cool little experiment if you ask me.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at April 3, 2004 05:53 PM | TrackBack