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Friday, October 16, 2009

Mobile Blogging

It is an unfortunate fact that most of my good ideas for the blog come to me while I am away from the computer. So it would be good if I could write the blog while I am on the move. How to do this puzzled me for a while. I have read about carrying the blog database around on a jump drive and sending emails to post remotely. That all sounds too complicated to me.

Carrying around my blog database on a thumb drive seems a bit risky because I am always losing things.

Publishing with an email is difficult because I have no computer where I can leave Thingamablog running all day in the unlikely event that a stroke of genius will hit and I can email it to the program. Our computer is used by the whole family, and many people are logging on and off of the machine all day long.

Finally, I had an "Aha" insight that cleared it all up for me.

The Aha insight was that there is a difference between blogging remotely and publishing remotely. As long as I can enter the information on the road, it doesn't matter that I must wait until I get home to publish it. As it turns out, entering the text of a blog entry is as simple as using any text editor (I use Vim) to do the creative part, and then I can bring it home or send it home and paste the results into the blog editor to publish it. That is exactly what I did today.

During lunch time at work I had an inspiration, so I typed it into a text file and emailed it to myself at home. Once I got home, it took me about 20 seconds to copy the text from the email and paste it into a new blog entry. I published it and there it was. It worked great.

I really like the idea. It is simplicity itself.

Posted by Brian S. Kimerer at 9:38 PM

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