It’s The Geekend! – Are you reading this blog through Spokeo?

My Mobile Adventures *~*~* presents…
“It’s The Geekend!” Volume 1, No. 2
© Copyright 2008 Tink *~*~*
http://MyMobileAdventures.blogspot.com

Are You Reading This Blog Through SPOKEO?

If you are one of the Spokeo readers, can you raise your hand please? I’d like to follow you back, but Spokeo doesn’t seem to have a feature that allows me to see who has my blog listed under “Friends”.

So… if you are one of the Spokeo subscribers, please leave a comment or email me or send up a flare or whatever! I’d like to have the opportunity to follow you back.

BTW, for those who never heard of Spokeo – it’s a social media aggregator. Suppose one of your friends has a blog AND they’re on Twitter, AND they post photos to Flickr, AND they post videos on YouTube, etc. With an aggregator you don’t have to go to four different places to read their stuff. You just go to the aggregator, and there it all is. There are other aggregators out there besides Spokeo. I have an account with Spokeo, but I also like FriendFeed, especially since there is an iGoogle widget available for FriendFeed. I just put it on my iGoogle home page and I can see at a glance who is posting what. If the source that you want to read has an RSS feed, you can always use Google Reader, too. I have also messed around a little with Feedly, which is a Firefox add-on. And speaking of Firefox add-ons….

ScribeFire Update

A few weeks back, I wrote about ScribeFire, a blogging tool that is actually a Firefox add-on and very convenient to use. Overall, I really like it; however, I did mention in that article that I was having some issues uploading photos. The next release of the Firefox add-on seems to have fixed those particular issues; however, several readers have told me this week that they are unable to see my photos. It doesn’t happen to all of my readers, and it doesn’t happen all the time, but the one condition that seems to be consistent among people cannot see my photos is that the photos in question were uploaded using ScribeFire. If I replace them with something I uploaded from the Blogger interface or with something that is hosted elsewhere, we are fine.

Regrettably, I will probably discontinue the use of ScribeFire for my blogging tool needs. I am pretty much all about the photos on this blog, so anything that might be interfering with your viewing pleasure is of some concern to me. If I find out that it’s NOT ScribeFire, I’ll happily use it again. As I type this, I see that Blogger is threatening a “scheduled outage” at 4:00 PM PDT (in 20 minutes, yikes, better finish!) – so maybe, just maybe it’s a Blogger problem and they’re going to fix it tonight.

I’ve thought about trying to find another blogging tool to use, but there’s going to be a major event coming soon that might make that unnecessary….

This Blog Will Be Moving Soon!

Date to be determined! For months now, my friend and website guru Annie of Pixel Currents has been working on and off on setting up a new home for My Mobile Adventures *~*~* self-hosted using WordPress. I like Blogger, but I’ve got a lot of space over at the hosting site where TinkRBell is located. That’s my pre-blog trip report site – lots of Sanibel and Disney trip reports and photos live there, from before I moved to Florida. I want to make use of all the space and bandwidth I have there, and have a photo gallery as well.

We’ve had TinkRBell shut down for a while now, redirecting everyone to here at the blog while we tried to figure some things out and messed around in the boiler room some. One of the things that stopped us from getting on with it and launching the new site was figuring out how to make Word Press do the “mobile” part. We messed with Utterz, but the photos were teeny tiny when we initially messed with it, so the idea was abandoned. I have, however, used Utterz here at the Blogger blog to send audio and video from my phone, and it works swell for those purposes. You can even mash them together if you time it right – audio, text, photo, video, combined into a single post.

I really kind of enjoyed the time I was at Disney and sort of having a conversation with Snowbird and Mare in real time. I would send a mobile post to the blog, they would comment, the comments would come to my phone via SMS text, I would call Utterz and leave an audio response which got forwarded to the blog, they would comment some more… it was really fun! And I want to get into more of that sort of interaction while I’m out and about mobile blogging.

Anyhow, fast forward a few months and we became aware of a mobile blogging plug-in for WordPress that looked really promising, but I didn’t have the right phone for it. Honestly, I was getting peeved by my carrier’s inability to give me bars out on the islands anyway, so I was ripe to switch services, but the WordPress plug-in situation kind of sent me over the edge, and that is how the Crackberry came about.

Alas, we found the WordPress plug-in to be buggy and uncooperative. And then came the day when Utterz decided to offer larger photo sizes – yay! We did some testing and voila, we were in business!

So now we are all excited, knocking out walls, picking out new drapes and carpeting, doing some decorating, and all that kind of thing. We are getting pretty close to the point where we can re-launch TinkRBell and the new blog. I’ll be sure to start bellowing about it often and early, and I’m hoping that not too many of you, my precious subscribers, gets lost!

OK, I think that’s enough geekishness for one post. Long post! Have a great GEEKEND! TTYL