Years before smartphones existed, friends of mine in the Japan Bloggers group* developed moblogging (mobile blogging) to let us share photos and text from our flip phones. Moblogs caught on big in Tokyo and then spread. Eventually, personal moblogging was superseded by Twitter, Instagram, and other massive social networks we use now.
Today, I am going back to moblogging. I’ve set up a workflow so I can share photos from my phone to a dedicated page here on Mediatinker. Basic and good.
Goodbye, Instagram. No more Meta. Maybe no more audience as well, but I want this for my own ephemeral memories way more than I want followers.
Moblog is the page and it has its own button in the footer on every page of Mediatinker. It’s not perfect, but it’s within my control to improve. Come visit anytime.
How to moblog with WordPress + Jetpack + Gmail
These instructions will vary in detail depending on what OS and versions you’re running, but in general this setup will do the job. It is surprisingly easy.
- Add a new category in WordPress for your moblog posts.
- Build a page to display posts from your moblog category.
- In Jetpack from the WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Writing > Post by Email to create a secret e-mail address.
- Save that address in your mail contacts.
- In Gmail on Android, set up an entry in your Gboard’s Personal Dictionary so that you can autocomplete the shortcodes in your mail. For example:
[category moblog] [status publish]
shortcut “mob”
And that lets you moblog via Gmail with a photo attachment. The subject of your mail becomes the post title by default. The body of the email becomes your caption/excerpt. Use autocomplete for the shortcodes to put the post in the right place on your site.
…AND SORRY! I think I flooded my newsletter subscribers with five or six test posts as I was setting this up. As soon as I realised that was happening, I changed the settings. No more moblog photos in your inbox. You should only get the regular posts now.
* Those Japan Bloggers were Stuart Woodward, Justin Hall, & Adam Greenfield plus early adopters Mia Kennedy, Tracey Northcott, & MJ Daniels-Sueyasu among others. If you want to know more, here’s a thorough article about the history of moblogs: https://grokipedia.com/page/mobile_blogging
