I have been "blogging" I guess for about 7 years now, off and on. When I was in college, I had the worst luck when it came to girls, but I always seemed to have a date. My friends would always want to know how my date went, and I got tired of telling the same stories over and over, so I decided that I would write my stories down, post them to my website, and let my friends read for themselves… thus my "blogging" started. Over the years, when something would piss me off enough, I would write about it. I still have copies of everything I have written, its just not online anymore.

Most people with blogs use a company like blogger or live journal or something like that to host their blogs. Me being a nerd I decided to write my own.

Since I run my own server, I rarely look at 3rd party companies for hosting solutions, expecially image hosting. I know a lot of people love flickr.com, but I never really knew why… until I signed up for an account to check it out.

The first thing that grabbed my was the abbility for me to use my camera phone (T-Mobile SideKick II), to send pictures straight to the web. I was hooked. Being the computer geek that I am, I couldnt leave it at that. I had to figure out how do to this for myself.

Late last friday night, I sat down and started coding. By 4am, I was able to duplicate flickr's photo email system. The way it works is pretty simple. I take a picture with my phone. I email the picture to a special email account useing my phone. I wrote a small program that checks my email box periodically, if it finds there is an email from me, it saves the image, turns the email subject into the photos title, and turns the emails body into the photos caption. All that info gets dumped into a database. pretty simple really 🙂

So, by being able to post pictures and text to my blog while on the go, I have turned it into a "MOBLOG"…. a mobile blog. I never really used the camera on my phone before this. I love it though. I just wish that T-mobile would release a better camera on the next version of the sidekick.

To check out the images that I have taken so far, go here: http://www.notpopular.com/blog/photoList.php, or click the "photo blog" link at the top of the page

Im thinking about relasing my code as open source. Im not sure though.