Blogging Tips

Posting to Blogger while on the move!

Those using Blogger to publish their blogs have several tools at their disposal for publishing posts remotely. This is especially useful for those publishing travel-blogs, photo-blogs, or simply to break news while away from your computer.

In this article, I’ll explain several different methods you could use to post to your Blogger blog while you are away from your computer including any caveats and limitations to ensure you choose the method most suitable for your needs.

Mail to Blogger

Mail-to-Blogger is an integrated feature of Blogger.com which enables you to post to your blog from any email account. Since most mobile phones these days allow you to send email directly from your handset, this is a simple and effective way of posting to your blog while traveling or away from your home computer.

To set up email posting for your Blogger blog, log into your Blogger dashboard and choose the blog you want to post to.

Then click on the “Email” tab near the top of the screen, which will bring up the settings page for your mail-to-Blogger account:

Here you can format the email address to which you should send your email posts to. The format of this address is yourusername.a-secret-word@blogger.com. In the text-area, you should type a memorable, secret word to form your Mail-to-Blogger email address. This will be unique to the blog for which you have saved these settings, which also enables you to post by email to different Blogger blogs on your account.

Be sure to keep your “secret word” to yourself, as if leaked, this could allow anyone to post to your blog via email!

On this page, you can also choose whether to save your emailed posts as drafts or publish immediately. You can only choose one or the other, and this setting will apply to all posts sent by email to the blog you are working with. Most bloggers choose to publish right away (as these posts can always be edited afterward through the Edit Posts page in the Blogger dashboard). Saving your emailed posts as drafts could be useful for those who prefer to post notes to their blog and craft a lengthier well-written post at a later time.

Once you have chosen your Mail-to-Blogger address and saved this setting, you are ready to begin posting to your Blogger blog via email. Here’s how easy it is to get started:

Open up your favorite email client, be it Google Mail, Outlook or your mobile phone.
Type in your Mail-to-Blogger address as the recipient email address.
For the subject line, enter the title of your post. This will be properly formatted by Blogger as the title of your published post.
In the message section, type the content of your post.
Once you have done, simply press “send” to have your email posted to your blog (or saved as a draft, if you have chosen this option in your Blogger Email settings).

If you want to add a picture to your emailed post, you can send this as an attachment. Blogger will then format, resize and publish your picture when the emailed post is received. Usually this image will appear at the top of your post, and be centrally aligned.

For those whose emails include an email signature, text or banners in the footer, you can add #end to the message section of your email where you want the post to finish. Blogger will recognize that this is indeed the end of your post and will not publish anything which appears after it, such as unwanted links to your email provider

HTML or Plain Text?

If you need to format your emailed posts (such as bold or italic text, include hyperlinks or underlined sections of text), you will need to ensure your emailed post is sent in HTML or Rich Text format.

Most email clients allow you to choose this setting in the options section. HTML based emails will be interpreted by Blogger’s Mail-to-Blogger API, and these posts will typically appear in the same style as they have been typed.

However, you must ensure no <HTML>, <head> or <body> tags appear in the outputted code of your HTML emails! If your email client adds these tags to HTML based emails, this could cause layout problems for your blog as essentially such tags create an entire web page, rather than the formatting of a regular blog post. Typically, this would cause your blog sidebar to fall down beneath your main posts section, as Blogger will interpret your post as a complete web page within your blog template.

If this happens, you will need to edit your blog post through your Blogger dashboard and remove any instances of <html>, <head> and <body> from the HTML code of your post.

In this case, check if your email client supports Rich Text emails, rather than HTML. Blogger does interpret rich text emails in the same fashion as when you post using the Compose tab, and no such layout issues should occur.

Plain Text emails are interpreted literally. That is, you cannot use HTML tags (such as <b> for bold text, <a href=…> for hyperlinks, etc). If you do try to type HTML tags in a Plain Text email for your Mail-to-Blogger service, such tags will appear literally in your posts, causing confusion to your readers.

Generally speaking, HTML or Rich Text based emails work well, especially if you post links or format any text in your emailed posts. But even if you are restricted to Plain Text emails, any images you attach will still appear in your published posts!

Blogger Mobile

With Blogger Mobile, you can post straight to your Blogger blog from your mobile phone by MMS. This can be a photo, text or both!

To use Blogger Mobile, you will need an MMS enabled handset and your regular mobile phone provision. Blogger does not charge any costs for using this service, though your mobile phone provider may charge the usual rate for sending an MMS message for each post you send to your blog. Lengthy messages may even constitute more than one message. You will need to check with your provider for any limitations of MMS length to find if this may be an issue for you.

Here is an official Blogger video which explains how to use Blogger Mobile in more detail:

Blogger Mobile – Video Tutorial

Unfortunately, not all carriers are yet supported by Blogger Mobile. You can check if your own network is supported by referring to the list of mobile carriers supported by Blogger.

If your mobile network is supported, you can get started with Blogger mobile by sending an MMS to go@blogger.com. Any text or images contained in this MMS will be published right away to a new blog.

Soon after, you will receive a “token” to your mobile phone in reply to your initial message. This will also contain the URL of the new blog to which your MMS has been posted. You can then log into go.Blogger.com to claim your blog and change any settings as required.

If you already have a Blogger blog and would like your mobile posts to be published to this existing blog, log into go.blogger.com and use your token to link your mobile phone to your existing blog instead. Afterward, any posts you send by MMS will be published to your existing blog.

To learn more about Blogger Mobile, here are some useful links:

If (like me!) your mobile provider is not supported by Blogger, you may like to try using Flickr to post via your mobile phone instead.

Post photos to your blog via your mobile phone and Flickr

Using Flickr, you can post photos from your cameraphone to your blog which will also appear in your Flickr photostream.

This is a little more complicated than using Blogger Mobile, but if photoblogging is important to you, it’s well worth the little effort involved

To enable blog posting via Flickr, you should first set up your Flickr account (if you haven’t already done so). Then visit the Upload by Email page, where you can set up two unique email addresses for your Flickr account:

To upload photos to your Flickr account by email
To upload photos to your Flickr account and post these images to your blog

To post photos to your blog, you must set up both of these email addresses, even though we will only be using the second email address.

Once you have acquired a unique Flickr-to-blog email address, simply MMS or email your photos from your cameraphone to this address. As with Blogger Mobile, the subject line of the message will become the title of your blog post (and also the title of your image in your Flickr photostream).

You can add some text to your message which will be published to your blog alongside your photo. Also, you can choose how you prefer the published posts in your blog to appear by changing the settings through Flickr.

Posting Via Twitter with LoudTwitter

Using LoudTwitter, you could post your Twitter tweets to your Blogger blog using a combination of mobile Twittering and Mail-to-Blogger.

LoudTwitter collects all of your Twitter tweets each day and posts them to your blog in a single blog post, so your readers can easily read your tweets in one place. It would also be a good method for collecting and publishing links to useful sites, the day’s events or other micro-informational posts.

This method is a somewhat quirky, “love it or hate it” method which may not be suitable for all bloggers, though I’ll offer the details for those who would like to use it.

Firstly, you will need to set up your Twitter account so you can send tweets from your mobile phone. To do this, log into Twitter and click on the Devices link for your account. On this page, you can add your mobile phone by entering your number (in international format). Once you receive a confirmation code on the screen, send this code as a message from your handset to the number provided. This will confirm that you are the owner of this mobile phone number and allow you to update by text message.

Next, you will need to set up your Mail-to-Blogger account (as detailed above). Make a note of your secret email address as you will need this for the third step.

Lastly, visit LoudTwitter.com and enter the URL of your blog in the box on the home page, then click “Yes this is my blog”. On the following page, you can “login using OpenId” to allow LoudTwitter access to your Blogger account which verifies that you are the owner of this blog.

The next page will explain about Atom posting using Loud Twitter. Now unfortunately, this method won’t allow LoudTwitter updates to be added to a Blogger blog. Instead, you will need to use the “Post-by-email” method instead, so click on this link to continue:

On this page, you need to add the email address you specified for Mail-to-Blogger. Simply type this unique email address into the box provided and save your settings. Using this method effectively gives LoudTwitter permission to post your daily Twitter summary to your blog via email.

The title for each blog post published through LoudTwitter will be “Twitter Tweets”. As far as I can tell, there is no way to change this setting.

Once everything is set up, all you need to do is send a Tweet to your Twitter account via your mobile phone and LoudTwitter will post this to your blog for you!

Posting via Ping.fm

Ping.fm is a simple service which potentially allows you to update all of your social networks in one go. Using Ping.fm, you could update your blog, Twitter, Facebook and indeed any of the sites covered by this service simply by sending an email to your unique Ping.fm email address.

To get started, simply sign up for your free Ping.fm account, then choose Blogger (plus any other networks you’d like to update) from those provided in the list.

Enter the login details for your Blogger account, then choose the blog(s) you would like to post to from the list generated from your Blogger account.

Once you have set up your blog, visit your Ping.fm dashboard and scroll down until you can see the “Post by email” link on the right. This will take you to the page where you can see your unique Ping.fm email address to which you can send your posts by email.

Any HTML tags published in an HTML email will be properly interpreted by Ping.fm before they are published to your blog. If you would like to publish any pictures, simply attach these to your email and these will be published in your posts.

Final thoughts

In this article, I’ve detailed five different methods you could use to publish to your Blogger blog while away from your computer.

If you use a different method to publish to your Blogger blog while away from your computer, please let us know about this by leaving your comments and suggestions below.

Written by Amanda Fazani from Blogger Buster
Posted on November 10th, 2008 and filed under Blogger
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One Response to “Posting to Blogger while on the move!”

Author comments are in a darker gray color for you to easily identify the posts author in the comments

Mike Huang says:

November 10, 2008 at 6:47 pm

The great thing about the future now is that everything can be done through a mobile source, BUT it’ll make us all dependent on these sort of things. Just think about how much radiation we’re putting ourselves through, but no one will know the results since it’s only been recent. I wonder if some of us would turn green in like 20 hours

-Mike