How to support Mobile Content Creation in Drupal

by Actual News Geezer | February 9, 2007 at 08:10 am

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Roland Tanglao of Bryght did me a great favour.

I had discovered that - despite having bought a very nice smartphone with lots of wells and bistles - I could not for the life of me send a photo from my phone directly to nowpublic.

Roland helped me out of a tight jam by showing me what a dufous I am. He calls it a "nice conversation;" from my perspective it was like an ego-mugging.

He's way too smart. His knowledge of mobility blogging is such that he beta tests the latest gear for one of the major manufacturers.

So we went through the entire process of figuring what we'd need to do to make it easier for our Mobile Journalists to begin filing stories right from their cell phones. Roland showed me Shozu (which I am now using to post photos to Flickr). There are other technologies out there too, but unless you have a cheap data package from your mobility provider, it can be somewhat expensive.

In fact, without a data package, some users in countries like Canada might find themselves paying upwards of $5 - 10 for one 1 mb photo! Ouch!

If this subject interests you, please have a read below. And check out his terrific analysis of MoJo tech and its related user costs.

I had a nice conversation with Mark Schneider of Now Public yesterday about how to encourage their users to put more mobile content on their "worldwide citizen journalism newsagency" site. I wrote up a summary on the Bryght public wiki that is specific to Drupal sites like Now Public but generally applies to any website.

Here's an excerpt from: my wiki page (it's a wiki page, so feel free to update my typos and add other cool Drupal suggestions and modules!), How to Support Mobile Content Creation in Drupal:

The general rule should be to provide as many roads to Drupal as possible! The base technology (i.e. protocols like email, MetaWeblogAPI and Atom Publishing Protocol) are relatively "easy", getting something usable and useful on the mobile device is the hard part.