So over the last few months I’ve tried a few times at finding a way to simply add moblogging, a method of bloging from a mobile device such as a cell phone, ability back to my blog. Now, I realize that if I just broke down and got one of those snazzy iPhones, there would be an application I could download and there wouldn’t be an issue, but my lowly Palm Centro works fine for what I’m doing, and doesn’t require me to get an expensive data plan.

At first I tried just using the “Post via E-mail” feature built directly into WordPress, but I couldn’t seem to get this to work. It would log in, check the email, and make a post with the email’s subject line as the title of the post, but there would never be any content in the post. I’ve gone through a few minor updates to WP since first trying this feature, all with the same result, and so I decided to see if I couldn’t find a plug-in that would offer me this feature.

Turns out, I didn’t have to look far before finding Postie. I’ve only done a simple test from gmail -> WordPress, but it seems to work well and offers a lot of features. For instance you can apply categories to the post by including the name of the category in square brackets in the subject line of the email, and it supports attaching of images and files to the blog post. I’ll make sure to tag posts I do like this with a Moblog category, so if you see that starting to get some heavy use, you can safely assume that I’m using this and liking it!

I was talking to my sister’s boyfriend, Chris, last night and I’m not quite sure how it came up in converstaion, but he started telling me about an episode of PBS’s Independent Lens called The Political Dr. Seuss. I haven’t watched it yet, but did read a summary of it on the Independent Len’s page, and wanted to record this somewhere so I didn’t forget to watch it later. That page summarizes the documentary as follows:

THE POLITICAL DR. SEUSS traces Theodor Geisel’s life from his boyhood in Springfield, Massachusetts through his final days living atop Mt. Soledad in La Jolla, California. The film explores his little-known World War II era cartoons, his educational and propaganda film work—including the “Private Snafu” films he made with Chuck Jones—and Design for Death, his Academy Award-winning documentary on Japan, which is seen here for the first time since its original theatrical release in 1947. In-depth interviews with his widow Audrey, his biographers Judith and Neil Morgan (Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel) and Richard H. Minear (Dr. Seuss Goes to War), his long-time Random House publisher Robert Bernstein and editor Michael Frith, and historian Michael Kazin—not to mention Geisel’s own words through voice-overs—bring the man to life. THE POLITICAL DR. SEUSS is not only an intriguing portrait of Theodor Geisel but also a fascinating lens through which to view the complex political and social history of the 20th century.

I just installed Drivel, which seems to be a pretty nice Linux application to post entries to your blog right from your desktop. It supports a few different blogging technologies, including WordPress, Drupal, blogger.com, and livejournal. I’m hoping having this around will reduce the amount of effort in making a blog post, and hence will start blogging more.