moblog.benmoore.biz

I'm having a blast with the Treo. One of the things I was interested in playing with was mobile blogging. I went to Blogger's mobile blog site and read up on it. It's simple to setup. Just e-mail a picture from your phone to go@blogger.com. Blogger sends you an e-mail reply with a URL and a claim code. You go to go.blogger.com, enter that claim code and "claim" that blog.

Then you can rename it to what you want and associate it with your Blogger account. After that, it just shows up in your list of blogs.

One little variant I ran into is that the first time I sent off a photo, I used MMS and the next time, I used e-mail. This turned out to actually be an advantage as I claimed both of those and pointed them to the same blog. That way, I can send photos either way and they end up at the same place.

There was one little bump in the way that Blogger builds the html for the posts. Blogger uses the following html:

<p class="mobile-photo">
<img width="320" src="http://photos1.blogger.com/ ... .jpg"/>
</p>

The problem with this is that the photos are constrained at 320 pixels. Now for most phones, this may be Ok but the Treo takes photos that are 640x480.

I searched Blogger's help for how to change this limitation to no avail. Finally, I sent them a question but they responded that they were too busy to answer.

So I fell back on my favorite problem solver: Google. The first hit from a search for "css width" turned up this page. I took the template from the new blog and pasted it into a real-time html editor so I could play with it. I stuck the following into the <style> section:

.Post img{width:640px}

CSS attributes over-ride html attributes so the result was that the html acted like it had 'width="640".' I wish there was a more direct relationship between CSS attributes and html attributes but ...

Here's the resulting moblog.