Archive for the 'General' Category


Postie

Sunday, November 16th, 2008

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!

The Political Dr. Seuss

Saturday, November 15th, 2008

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.

Mobloging is Back!

Friday, August 29th, 2008

Hey everyone!

Sorry posts here have been slow, but I’ve been pretty busy. From mid March through April, I was roaming around South East Asia. Then from May till August I was working at a camp, Philmont, in New Mexico, teaching kids low impact camping skills and keeping them safe from bears. And then I went with my friend Geoff and hiked the John Muir Trail from Yosemite Park down to Mt Whitney in California. That was 230+ miles in 17 days of hiking. The entire time after leaving Toulume we only saw TWO roads! We were pretty out there. It was incredible!

Now I’ve been back in LA for a few days, catching up with friends here and plan to ride a bike back up San Francisco with another friend Noah, and thought I might try to fix up the mobile blog again. So here’s a first go at that. Lets see if it works!