Picture perfect

I’ve finally managed to get Airblogging to work here. So now I, too, can shoot bad cell phone pictures to my blog, just like all the cool kids. W007!

(Actually, you don’t even need to send pictures. You can use it to just Post Stuff. Which is kinda cool.)

More on configuring Airblogging (which is kinda minimalist in documentation and support) below, as well as notes on an alternative …

The key to Airblogging is properly configuring the User Options screen, the MT Options screen, and your blog (assuming, like me, you use Movable Type for your blog). The setup wizard walks you through some of this, but you’ll still need to do some direct modifications.

The configuration below works with my Treo 650, on AT&T (now Cingular in name, but still using AT&T’s mMode network), posting to MT. If your configuration varies, so might your results.

Airblogging: User Settings

• Wireless Phone Number: [my cell number with the “1” prefix; I’ve seen folks do it without the 1.]
• Email Address: [my home e-mail address. no e-mails actually seem to come to this.]
• Mobile Alias: [some folks leave this blank; the instructions say to use it to identify a username for yourself if your carrier requires it for what comes through on e-mail. For AT&T users, it says (in the news, not the setup directions) to use your mMode mail address, which translates out to 1[number]@mmode.com.]
• Web logging Software: Movable Type
• Blog User: [a MT account I set up for this purpose; see below]
• Blog Password: [password for that MT account]
  Blog ID: [MT blog number for the blog in question. From MT’s main menu, hover over the link blog you want; in the status bar you’ll see an URL with the &blog_id= in it; choose the number that it equals.]

• Wireless Carrier: AT&T [In theory, I should be able to choose Cingular, right? In reality, formerly AT&T Wireless are Cingular in name only, and as of this writing, are completely separate networks with different behavior.]
• Image Directory: images [This is a relative URL to your blog address as to where images should be uploaded; in this case, the translation is that they should go to https://www.hill-kleerup.org/blog/images. This is from the perspective of MT, mind you, so you don’t need to worry about public_html and other “invisible” root directories. Note that if the directory doesn’t exist, it will be created.
• Custom IMG attributes: class=”right” width=320 height=240 [put in anything special you want to have show up in the IMG tag of the picture. In this case, I hardcoded the dimensions of photos my camera sends, as well as a CSS style to right align it in the post and leave a bit of border around it.]
• Time Zone: [figure it out]

Note that I have had intermittent problems saving options on the airblogging.com site, getting odd SQL errors at various times. Just keep trying.

Airblogging: MT Settings

• XMLRPC Gateway: XMLRPC Gateway: [full http path to mt-xmlrpc.cgi, including that CGI script, e.g., http://yourMTexecutabledirectory/mt-xmlrpc.cgi; this will probably be the same path as the mt.cgi executable you run to open up the control panel.]
• Comments: 1 [if you want the post to have comments open, then 1; otherwise, 0]
• Track Backs: 1 [ditto for trackbacks]
• Pings: 1 [presumably this does the MT configured “pings” for the new post; 0 if you don’t want to]
• Blog Name: [enter your blog name; this and the following two entries at least seem to be for airblogging’s own edification, not for any program requirement]
• Blog Url: [enter the URL to your blog, or else “0”]
• RSS Url: [enter the URL to your blog’s RSS/Atom feed, or else “0”]
• Check Url: 0 [no idea what this does, but it seems to work at “0”]

When it comes to configure the MT userid that will do the posting here, you can simply point to an existing user (like yourself), but I chose to create a specialized one (so I can more easily detect any problems, and so that I can limit the rights it has).

Create the author through MT, and make sure it has the following rights to the blog you want to airblog to:

• Post
• Upload File
• Rebuild Files
• Send Notifications

Note that uploaded images will have their own crazy userid names set by Airblog, regardless of the userid they have on your PDA.

I had serious problems making Airblogging work, largely because (a) the documentation on how to set these fields was pretty sketchy (thus my efforts here to document it), and (b) when it doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work, with no errors or anything back, and I never got a response from the developer about something else I queried of, and the news page makes it clear that he’s not really actively supporting it. (Thanks to Doyce for his assistance in getting me running; turns out, in the final analysis, I’d made the goofy error of not giving the MT userid “Upload File” ability — d’oh!)

If you want something that gives you a bit more info back and is quite a bit better documented (and is still, I think, actively supported), you might try MFOP2. It has all the attributes I just described, plus it allows you to better configure how the posts should look. Main drawbacks are (a) the message you send requires a bit more internal typing/formatting to ID the subject, password, etc., and (b) I had a problem making it work and (and, a few hours later, haven’t heard anything back, and meantime got Airblogging to work).

If I can get MFOB2 to work, I might very well change over to it, just so that I can not have the little auto-advertising blurb at the bottom of the post. We’ll see. I’ll update this post as seems fit.