Unwise Spending

I realised that the only way I could keep up with my blogging was from my Palm Treo, when I'm traveling from one place to another. I was doing ok on hblogger though it had a few irritating bugs like not having subject header i.e. no title, and not being able to post images for posting to beta blogger. as I was on trial version of the software, I naively thought that these problems would disappear with the purchased version. as they say, desperation makes a fool of the best of us.

Well, I just made the purchase of hblogger at USD14.95, and sadly, the problems didn't go away. I also found out that I would need an FTP server if I wanted to post images to my blog! I checked their website at Normsoft, and the last update by the company was in 2004 which states the same bugs I was experiencing with the program. Given that its already 2007, I don't think I will be seeing version 3 anytime soon.

I was baffled why there was such a lack of good mobile blogging software. Annoyed actually. And the fact that I couldn't photoblog from my PDA was too irritating to leave it as it was. So I got to work and did some thinking and logical projections.

Which was the most popular online photo publishing site I had an account with? Flickr. As blogger allowed you to claim FTP sites so that your photos automatically got posted on your blog when you upload it to your FTP server, I wanted to investigate if it accepted the Flickr server (as opposed to paying for an FTP server juz to upload photos!).

Kudos to Flickr, they allow you to add blogger to your Flickr account which allows you to post a photo blog through Flickr using email! Best part is that you can opt to include email text in the post. I did a test and it worked beautifully - see the previous blog entitled test photo? That was sent via email from my PDA phone to a designated Flickr email which automatically got posted to my feather starfish account. Neat eh?

So what does it mean? That I could have saved myself USD14.95 if I had discovered this alternative solution earlier. Well, you learn something new everyday. If I saved you 14.95 through this post and you happen to be in town, you should really think about buying me coffee.