Blog*Spot/Blogger/whatever it is has a neat feature to specify your own domain name for your blog. Using this I have set up a new url for my moblog at http://moblog.petersblog.org in addition to http://petersmoblog.blogspot.com.
"Why bother" I hear you scream? Well, if I publish that url and it builds up any kind of readership (we live in hope) then I am free, should the whim take me, to change my hosting to some other platform without losing my audience.
I do care about you.
The big news could be the launch of Peter's Moblog. I got a new phone, a Sony Ericsson k800i as I wanted something with a better camera than my old K750i. This one is 3.2 megapixel and has a proper flash, albeit weedy. When I take pictures with the flash the background tends to be black. As a camera it is obviously not a patch on my Nikon D80 but the D80 doesn't fit in my pocket (I carry it in a backpack camera bag that I bought in Lidl). The k800i is a 'Cyberhot' i.e. branded as more camera focussed than a W series walkman phone.
The latest camera-phones are five megapixel but much more expensive and for me good lenses and low-noise electronics are more important than high resolution.
The flash pictures are a little noisy and the backgrounds are dark but they are ok, much better than the blurry efforts of the K750i. It has a feature that allows it to take nine shots at once, four before the shutter is pressed and four after so you can choose the best one. Problem is this doesn't work with the flash. It shares with the k750i an annoying long delay between pressing the trigger and getting a picture so a pose has to be held extra long. Thats something I love about the D80, photos are INSTANT.
The lens on the phone is very wide angle and one wonders why they bother with an autofocus mechanism. You have to get the phone quite close to the subject to fill the frame and it borders on fish-eye.
Anyway the phone has a built-in facilty to upload photo's as blog posts to blogger so I couldn't resist setting this up. I hate to think what my phone bill is going to be but I hope the moblog can be a non-techy slice of life, mainly watching my daughters grow. I really like the idea that I can update it anywhere there is a phone signal. The main problem with it is getting the portrait/landscape orientation right.
Sometime I may try to integrate the blogs by pulling the moblog posts into this blog.
UPDATE: if any blogspot veterans can let me know why some photos on the blog are disappearing then I'd be grateful.
UPDATE2: according to online billing, each picture post costs about 15p. Not too bad unless I do more than one a day when investing £6/month in a bundle may be better. It seems much faster for browsing so I may be using more data anyhow. Turns out phone is 3G and I could get Sky TV on it if only I didn't live in the back of beyond that is rural Kent. I think one of the G's get lost the other side of Maidstone.
UPDATE3: More notes:
Peter's Moblog
