Aloha Friday: From Mobile With Photos

On Tuesday, I wrote about how I’ve switched off of using TwitPic and similar cell phone photo sharing services.  Instead, I set up my blog to receive and post the photos itself.  Already, I’ve had hidden Mickey photos from my grill, of items in my office and of special packages.  More photos will definitely flow in as I take them.  I’m loving that I don’t have to rely on the photo sharing services and can direct people right to my own blog instead of a third party’s website.

My Aloha Friday question for today is: Which (if any) Twitter/Mobile Phone photo sharing service do you use?  Would you be interested in setting your blog to accept the photos instead?

(As far as the latter question is concerned, my offer from Tuesday is still good.  I can set up anyone’s blog to accept mobile photos provided you are on self-hosted WordPress.)

Don’t forget to enter my giveaways.  You could wind Dinosaur Train Dino Poop and Hatchers or a Kung Fu Panda/General Mills gift pack.


Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the McLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha Friday by Kailani at An Island Life

Aloha #90

How I Broke Free Of Picture Sharing Services

Three weeks ago, Twitter began to buzz about a change in TwitPic’s terms of service.  The change appeared to give TwitPic the right to sell posted photos to third parties without the approval of and without sharing the revenue with the person who posted the photo.  Needless to say, people didn’t like this and began moving to YFrog and other image hosting sites.  TwitPic attempted to explain the TOS change but this didn’t satisfy everyone.

I have to admit, I was one of those people who weren’t quite reassured.  I switched over to YFrog.  However, then I began to think.  YFrog said they would never do what TwitPic did, but how could I be sure.  Perhaps a year from now we’ll all be talking about some big scandal about new YFrog TOS changes.  Or maybe YFrog will go belly up.  What would happen to my photos then?

In addition, I began to think about traffic.  When B was at Disney Social Media Moms, she saw Chris Brogan speak.  She relayed some of what he said to me including that you should treat your blog like your home base and Twitter, Facebook, etc like outposts.  Perhaps it was time to move my “photos shared from my cell phone” operation back into my home base.  After all, wouldn’t it be ideal to drive traffic back to TechyDad.com rather than SomeRandomPhotoSharingService.com?

I already had a pretty decent idea of how it would work.  I would create a super-secret e-mail address used only for posting photos.  A script on TechyDad.com would check this inbox for photos I sent and would make them into blog posts, uploading the photos and any additional text I provided.  Finally, an auto-tweet script would alert my Twitter followers of my uploaded image the same way that TwitPic or YFrog would.

While I’d have loved to have written the script myself, I decided to see if anyone had done a WordPress plugin.  Sure enough, I found Postie right away.  I figured others might want to do something similar with their blogs, so I’ll detail my basic steps below.   (NOTE: WordPress has a “Post By E-mail” feature, but you’ll see soon enough why I didn’t use this.) 

Step 1: Be Using Self-Hosted WordPress and install the Postie Plugin

None of this will work if you’re using Blogger or are hosted on WordPress.com.  There might be some solution for you, but I’m not sure what that would be.  Sorry.  If you do have a self-hosted WordPress blog, add the Postie plugin from the Admin control panel.

Step 2: Create a Post From Cell Phone E-mail address

You don’t want to set Postie to use your publicly available e-mail address.  There are protections against just anyone posting to your blog (more on these later), but do you really want to chance it?  So have your web host set up (or set up via their control panel) some kind of super secret e-mail address.  Something like thisisonlyusedby5551212topostpics@mysite.com.  Add that e-mail address to your cell phone’s contacts under a name like “Post Photo.”

Step 3: Configure Postie

In your sidebar, under Settings, click on Postie.  You’ll get a list of options to set up.  First of all, you’ll need to tell Postie just how to get to the e-mail inbox.  So give Postie the mail server, userid and password information.

Next, under User, you want to make sure that you’re the only one who can post.  This is where WordPress’s basic Post-By-Email function fails.  If a spammer were to guess the e-mail address, you might find your blog relaying a Nigerian prince’s pleas for help.  Make sure “Allow Anyone To Post Via Email” is set to No and set up the authorized addresses to be the e-mail address of your phone.  If you’re not sure about this, you could always send a TXT and Picture message to your normal e-mail address and see what e-mail addresses they come from.  (TXT and picture messages often display as two different e-mail addresses.)

Under Message, select the category that the messages should take.  I created a new one called Mobile Photos.  Text/picture messages received as e-mails can often contain signatures added by the providers.  (For example, “This message has been sent using the picture and Video service from Verizon Wireless!”)  Obviously, we don’t want that posting, so go under Advanced options and any signature as a new signature pattern.  You don’t need the whole thing, just enough to for Postie to recognize it and not confuse it with your own text.  (e.g. Don’t add in “This message” lest it cut you off when your post should say “This message comes overlooking a beautiful landscape.”)

You can customize the template under Image and fiddle with the other settings if you wish, but the basic functionality is there now.  Now, you should be able to take a photo, send it to your blog and have it posted.  The only thing you’re missing is tweeting it.

For this, I turned to the Twitter Tools plugin for WordPress.  Sadly, this plugin required a prefix for tweets.  Something along the lines of “New Blog Post”.  Of course, I didn’t want my Mobile Photo posts to be called “New Blog Posts”, so I went into the code.  It turned out to be a simple fix to make it stop using prefixes.  (I actually set it so that a prefix of a blank space would result in no prefix used at all since the application errors if no prefix is used.)  Since I don’t want to assume that everyone out there is comfortable coding, I’d simply recommend finding a prefix you can live with or using another plugin such as Tweet This.

Once this is set up, you’ll be able to completely replace the functionality of those Twitter photo sharing services.  Your photos will remain under your control, you’ll drive more traffic to your site and you won’t need to worry about some random terms of service changes (at least not with this).

If given the opportunity*, would you set something like this up for your blog?  Do you see an upside to TwitPic/YFrog type services that my Post-To-My-Blog solution doesn’t have?

* If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog, but aren’t techy enough to set this up,  I do freelance work on the side and might be able to help you out.  Send me an e-mail via the Contact Me form above.

Don’t forget to enter my Dinosaur Train giveaway.  You could win Dino Poop and Hatchers.

The Great Epcot Twitter Experiment

On Friday, March 18th, while B was in the DisneySMMoms conferences, NHL, JSL and I went to Epcot.  We sought out the characters and topiaries (more on those later), but at one point we happened upon the phone booths in the UK.

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Seeing it, I remembered reading that all of these booths were actual working pay phones.  They even had numbers that people outside of Disney World could call.  I wondered: If I tweeted the number from one of these booths, how long would it take before someone called me?  What kind of conversation would I have with a Random Twitter Follower?

My kids were not too keen on this experiment.  They just didn’t see the fun in it.  My seven year old actually said: “Dad, this trip is not about you.  It’s all about us!”  That clinched it!  The experiment was on!

I walked up to one of the booths, looked for the number and tweeted:

Tweet-Out

Then, we waited.  We didn’t have to wait long, however.  Soon the phone rang.  I picked it up and was asked if I was “TechyDad.”  After I answered “yes”, I had a nice (if short) conversation with @moth_editor and @cheimbuch!  (Short because the boys were getting restless and I wasn’t going to make them wait too long.)  We waited a couple of minutes after the phone call ended to see if anyone else called, but nobody did so we left.  I couldn’t help wondering how many times the phone rang that day leading Disney parks-goers wondering “Who is TechyDad and why is someone calling Epcot for him?”

Thanks to everyone who participated and those of you, like @BabiesGottaHavT, who tried calling and just got a busy signal.  By the way, if you want to try calling the Epcot UK phone booths to see what random people you get, here are the numbers:

Left Booth: 407.827.9862
Center Booth: 407.827.9863
Right Booth: 407.827.9861

That information comes from @adisneymom who had a similar idea (and coincidentally executed it the same day as my Twitter Experiment).

A few days later, when back in Epcot, I stopped to take some photos of my boys in the phone booths when the center phone rang.  I answered, but it turned out to be a wrong number.  At least I got some nice photos of my kids placing some calls (as NHL attempted to dial the phone without entering an area code… or putting in any money).

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Falling Behind

In my mind, I’m running down a path.  I think I’m making good time, covering a lot of ground.  Then I look up and see that the path is moving backwards.  No matter how fast I pump my legs to run forward, I’m actually slipping backwards.  It seems like no matter how much I do nowadays, there’s always more that needs to be done.  This applies to much in my life, but especially applies to my Twitter followers.

I never saw the point in auto-following people who followed you on Twitter.  Some might consider it rude, but I prefer to look at people’s tweets and evaluate if I’d like their tweets on my Twitter stream.  If I would, I follow the person.  If the person is just posting astrology readings or giveaway links, I’ll likely pass.  I don’t mean to offend (just like I wouldn’t be offended if I followed someone and they didn’t follow me back), it’s just how I manage my Twitter stream.

My process up until recently was to get the new e-mail from Twitter notifying me of a new follower.  I’d look at their tweets, decide if I should follow them back and mark that e-mail as read.  Rinse and repeat for each new follower.  At some point, though, I fell behind and now I fear I’ll never catch up.

As of this writing, I have 184 new follower e-mails to process.  Yes, some of those people will be spammers, I’m sure, but many more would be legitimate people.  Legitimate people whose tweets I would like to follow.  And yet, those e-mails sit there unread.  Every time I decide to go through them, the enormity of the task overwhelms me and I decide to do it later.  Maybe I’ll just code some sort of “New Follower Processor” page to help me with the task.

In the meantime, please don’t be offended if you followed me and I didn’t follow you back.  I’m probably just delayed by this backwards moving path.

The Repetitive Parent

“Sit Down.” “Clean Up Your Toys.” “Don’t Hit Your Brother/Sister.” “Don’t Put That There!” “How many times do I need to tell you…”

As most parents can attest, parenting can be a repetitive task.  You instruct your children to do something but, when the same situation arises soon afterwards, they don’t remember your instructions.  Instead, you need to repeat yourself.  Over and over again.

Every night for dinner, we go through the same routine.  I serve everyone their food and notice NHL is standing while eating.  He, apparently, hasn’t heard of this remarkable device that’s been invented recently called a chair.  He also doesn’t notice one right next to him.

“Sit down.” I tell him.  So he sits… with his legs pointing to the side.  This means that I can trip over his legs as I walk past and he isn’t facing the table.  The latter means crumbs on the rug.

“Put your feet facing forward,” I say.  So he complies.  Then he picks up a piece of food and eats it right over his lap.  I envision food falling down, missing his plate and the table and hitting his pants, the chair, the rug.

“Eat over the table,” I instruct.  So he does.  Until the next meal when we begin the cycle all over again.

I’ve joked about getting a sign made (and laminated) that I can just hold up.  After all, if I’m going to say the same thing over and over again, I’d like to spare my poor vocal cords.  I’ve even mocked up a sample.

Dinner Sign

During a Twitter conversation with slpowell, I mentioned this sign idea.  Then, re-reading slpowell’s original tweet that mentioned a “digital voice recorder”, I was struck by inspiration.  Instead of a printed sign (which is bulky and can only say one thing), how about one of those Staples Easy Buttons?  They only cost $5.50 at Staples and I recalled seeing instructions online as to how to hack them.

Of course, those required more work (and purchasing tools such as a Dremel) than I was willing to put into the project.  So I did the next thing that came to mind: Searched the web to see if anyone else was selling these.  Turns out, people are.  Here’s one shop that sells them for under $4.  (Shipping seems to be a flat rate of about $6.50 to me.)

Another intriguing option was this site that sells the buttons with the option of branding them.  As a bonus, this button comes with a strap (which can be used to hang the device in plain sight and yet out of the reach of little hands).  These cost $5 each.

I’m tempted to order a bunch with a “Parent Vocal Saver” logo on them and sell them online.  Would you buy such a device?

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