More Moblog
I recently finished up some work on the moblog section of the site. I had been using MMS Diary, a fine application by Hellkvist.org. MMS Diary works like a charm and was pretty easy to setup, only requiring some minor coding to make it XHTML compliant and setting up a custom MMS gateway on my phone. I had been using it for the past couple of months without a hitch but it had a few weaknesses that caused me to search for a better solution. For starters, MMS Diary does not have a very robust archiving system. It creates an incomprehensible series of folders and text files to store its data and would be very difficult to manage either manually or with a script. That ruled out the likelihood of me ever getting the data stored in a database. Likewise any ideas of RSS syndication were also thrashed. Furthermore, because MMS Diary used a custom MMS gateway, I essentially lost MMS functionality on my phone for anything save moblogging. Certainly a small concession, but not the tidiest of solutions.
So with a little help from my web host (updating a couple of PHP modules) I am now successfully running Marc Rohlfing’s simsi. Simsi has nearly everything I wanted: XML data storage, RSS feed, simple template system, local image storage, and it accepts posts via email and MMS without any special configuration on my phone or web server. The script is simple and self-contained in a single file. And since I first learned about simsi a few months back, I see that development continues at a brisk pace. The only feature I am really looking forward to is management tools that will allow me to edit/remove posts and maybe paginate or categorize them as my log grows.
The new system is up and running now, just click moblog in the navigation bar above to see it in action. More photos will be coming soon.
Update: I put up a fix for a little bit of weirdness that was happening with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows. Should be better now.