All this while I have been using Six Apart Vox for mobile blogging from my Palm Centro. The interface is good but I would very much prefer to blog directly to my WordPress blog from my Palm Centro.
The current method to post from Palm Centro to a WordPress blog would be by email. This method requires that you set up a secret email account where your WordPress blog will check the mail server for any post that you have done lately. It didn’t seem to work for me when I tried it. Don’t know what when wrong. However I wasn’t so keen on this method so I didn’t bother to figure out how to fix it.
However I thought perhaps some bright programmer might have come up with something useful and sure enough I found two ways where you could post from your Palm Centro or Treo mobile phone to a WordPress blog.
This software blog client was written by EIJ, and the last updated version was 24/4/2005. So the software is rather dated. It was designed for Palm Treo so I thought it might work with Palm Centro. After all the Palm O/S wasn’t so much different. Sure enough after installing it I could get it to work. However I doubt it will work with Palm Pre as the new O/S is rather different from the older Palm O/S. However, U*blog is not entirely perfect, it is rather buggy. Unfortunately the programmer has abandoned updating U*blog in light of newer Palm Web O/S being brought into the market. For those of us who are still using the older mobile Palm though it still runs but with some caveat and limitation.
I was able to set it up and it could post to my WordPress blog, the post was published immediately as soon as it was sent out. However when I tried posting photos the u*blog became unstable and started to crash my Palm Centro. Guess it wasn’t fully compatible my current model. I had to delete the program and reinstall it to get it to work. So I guess that left me with purely text blog posting to WordPress.
Cellspin.net
Next try was Cellspin. This blog client software however does not post directly into your WordPress blog. It goes through via their web app. In fact it is much more than just a blog client to your WordPress blog, they can directly post updates to your Facebook, Twitter, Blogger, etc account (and of course WordPress). They can update into all or selected social websites and blogger according to your wish.
Posting text, photos, videos and audio is all possible via Cellspin. However their Palm app program do need some improvement as I couldn’t save a draft if I was writing a post halfway and decided to keep it for later completion and as for photo posting, the comment space was really small with only one line of window to write your photo comment and it didn’t erase what was written previously and it took time to delete what was written previously. And you couldn’t switch your phone to standby mode if you wanted to suspend your typing temporary either. Hopefully they will improve on this shortcoming. However I do feel Cellspin is heading in the right direction with their app and service.
Another caveat for photo posting is that the pictures are stored in their server and not into your own server if you are posting to your self-hosted WordPress blog. My only fear is that if they discontinue their service, they would take down your photo (video and audio I suppose too) content. The text content at least would still remain with your WordPress blog.
Cellspin not only have an app for Palm but also for the other popular blogging devices like Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. So if you decided to switch to another mobile platform you could still continue to do your online posting thingy via your mobile phone. Since I have my eye on an Android phone I could continue where I left off from my Palm Centro. Not too bad.
Cellspin is not just keeping their focus small and by including other mobile devices, as well as trying to be a social network website plus a cross posting platform similar to Twitterfeed, HelloTxt and Ping.fm, well we will see how they fare. Hopefully they found a monetizing model to keep their service going for free.
My various test post:
U*blog test post
Another U*blog test post
Palm to WordPress posting
Cellspin test posting
Cellspin photo test post, borders at Curve Damansara
Palm mobile to WordPress blog post using U*blog and Cellspin