I continue to search for a decently reliable way to blog via my cell phone.
Now, I can actually call up the Movable Type edit screen on my Blackberry. It’s slow and awkward and the BB browser sucks mightily. (Going to another browser might help that — I am researching that possiblity — but the normal MT edit screen is a big, fat monster, not optimized for a small screen.)
There is no “native app” blog client I can find for the BB that goes to MT. (I had a similar problem on the Treo, by the bye.) Which seems just bloody stupid, but there it is.
I can photos by e-mail — sometimes. The MMS-to-Flickr is spotty sometimes, and the Flickr-to-MT thing seems to be a bit flaky, too.
For non-photo e-mail messages, I appear to be SOL. There are no trivial email-to-MT systems out there, either — bits and fragments of ones past, but nothing that I can just plug in. I had very high hopes over the last year that MT4, combined with 6A’s acquisition of SplashBlog from SplashData, would provide native posting of photos and/or text from mobiles to MT blogs … but I just read that 6A is shutting SplashBlog down, suggesting that folks move over to Vox or another canned blogging solution from them. Bleah. And I haven’t heard of any MT4 features to do what I’m looking for.
My ideal solutions:
- A blogging app for the BB that supports XML-RPC.
- A mechanism for e-mailing to MT.
Am I missing something obvious here? I don’t want to move off of MT, and I’m not giving up my BB, so if that means I can only do it through the browser, that’s tolerable but suboptimal.
Try saving the ‘quick post’ shortcut (custom-buildable from the main MT menu) into your favorites on the BB. That’s what I did, and it’s a much leaner page load on the smartphone browser — less of a pain to use.
Having problems with that — the screen is probably quicker and easier to navigate, but:
1. It involves (apparently) a huge Javascript load that runs horribly slow.
2. BB’s craptastic browser renders the secondary category list as a fully-dropped-down list that has to be scrolled past — and since the QP function uses all blogs potentially, it lists all the categories of all my blogs. 😛
On #2, at least, I want to check out the Opera mini-browser. BB’s browser (all of them — it actually comes with a couple of them) is widely lambasted as truly awful.
Downloaded Opera Mini. There’s not a version explicitly for the Curve, but I chose the generic high-rez edition, so we’ll see how it works. I can already tell you it *looks* a heck of a lot nicer.
Well, I just downloaded the Opera Mini browser for my BlackBerry Pearl, and it “failed to connect to the Internet.” Bleagh.
Depends on your service plan and provider. Go to http://blackberryforums.pinstack.com and search for Opera Mini and Pearl for tips.
Okay, got it connected.
Now, am I supposed to be able to select options on the bottom bar (Yes/No, Manage/Back) by scrolling and clicking? I have to press the Menu button and select the options from the list that pops up.
Hmm…
I also can’t fill in forms without clicking on the form, which opens an “Enter text” page. Awkward, especially when I have to enter a security code that i can no longer see. 😛
There are softkeys defined for the options on either corner of the screen (QW for the left one — probably OP for the right one, on the Pearl).
I agree that the “clear the window for text input” is a bit awkward — though I’ve seen similar things in the usual BB browser window.