Blogging -- how, where and when?

If you're one of our three readers, you've noticed that we're crazily sporadic in our blogging. There's the whole "why am I blogging" question, of course, but also some other issues: When do I have time? Where am I when something blog-worthy happens? How is it best to get the notional information into the blog?

Cathy and I have had iPhones for a few months now. Wow. We love them. I'm thinking they should help us blog on the go. I can Tweet pretty easily from my phone, so why not "real" blogging. But after a few hours of looking around and configuring various services, I think the options are pretty lame just now. At least if you're on blogger/blogspot/Google. They don't have a custom iPhone app -- maybe because that would be unsupportive of Android and the combination of other things doesn't add up to a seamless whole.

Here's what I can do:

I can email to the blog. From the iPhone, this can include a single picture and I have to initiate the process from the image -- I can't just attach it from the email client (can you say stoopid?). But this is actually a pretty elegant solution for simple posting while out and about.

I have enabled the iGoogle widget that lets me blog (among other things) from within Safari. It's also an adequate option for low-complexity posts. The good thing with this is that I can save the draft and edit it later. And I can even do it immediately -- this tool provides a quick link in. But no images without following that link. And the tool is a bit hard to use on the mobile screen.

We have a Flickr account under Cathy's name. And there is an app for the iPhone called Flickit. It does a pretty astounding job of getting images from my phone to Flickr. And I configured Flickr so that we can blog right from an image over to here. That's neat. But again, it only supports a single image. You can add more, but it's a hassle on the phone. And actually, what I do from my desktop PC seems to be impossible. Flickr knows that I'm using a mobile browser and present a simplified interface. One of the simplifications includes not displaying the "small" version of the image and not giving out the URLs. So again, it's a pretty hopeless tool for anything but the most simple use-case.

There's also an SMS-posting tool but we're on a limited texting plan and I don't want to go down that route.

So, with this imperfect array of tools, I'm going to try to blog stuff a bit more. Maybe I'll have to come back and edit things when I have a real keyboard or maybe I'll develop a style around these tools.

I keep thinking about buying a new Mac Mini so that I can write iPhone apps of my own. Here's an amazing example of something that needs to be written.

Make the World a Better Place

Cathy and I have been increasingly discussing how we can make the world a better place. Y'know, we're nobody...what can we do?!? Well, the answer is nothing -- at least if you don't try. So, these ideas that we come up with; what can we do with them? We need to catalog them and share them and solicit other ideas from other people. So we are. Right over here.

Please feel encouraged to stop by, read, let us know what you think, suggest ideas to us or maybe even write a guest column. :)