Ok, I'm walking in the park by the library, I go up to the message board, and there's a thing going on tomorrow that I'm sure nobody has heard a thing about ...

he whips open his cellular phone, taps in a quick message, clicks the send and zoom -- there it is, live and direct, posted on everyone's favourite community website!

It's really almost that simple, and gets simpler every day

if you have a membership on the South Bruce Peninsular, you have the priviledge of posting your news

and if your cellphone supports downloadable applications, you can post to the SBP right there, from where you are, right on the spot.

the Metaweblog API

Loosely translated, that just means there's a special webpage and specialized software that knows how to work with that page to take your story and slap it up on your SBP blog.

I use a free J2ME (Java Mobile) program called MIDLog by rawsocket. It supports most blog formats including the Blogger.com format used by Google's blog site, and the MovableType/Metaweblog method used here on the SBP. I enter my blog account details selecting the MovableType method and using a target location of http://sbp.teledyn.com/xmlrpc.php and I'm ready to roll -- all I need do after that is give my story a title and fill out a few lines of text, click the send and I'm published.

Mind you, it's not perfect.

Half the time it doesn't work at all and I have to re-enter the whole thing, and you only get a scant few lines in the text box. You can still make hotlinks using the Textile quote-colon coding, but it's awkward to do more than just leave a note -- fortunately, there are many times when a note is really all you need.

Another downside is that you can't post events, only blog entries; most often it's events that I find on posters that I want to inject into our calendar, but maybe next year, after I've had the slow winter months to figure a way around it :)

Reading SBP on your Phone

Yes, the reverse is possible too, and even sometimes useful although the very best use for it would again be that calendar of events.

The way I do this is to use one of the many RSS News Readers of which my favourite is Gosta Jonasson's RSSReaderMIDLet -- this time the magic code to enter into the thing to make it all work is the link behind those orange XML buttons you see on our pages. For example, to get the SBP main-page headlines and summaries into your phone, you'd point the RSS reader to http://sbp.teledyn.com/node/feed and thereafter just click on the @update option to download any stories added since you last looked.

Not only can you subscribe to the main page, you can also subscribe to your favourite SBP author directly by taking the link off their blog page -- mine would be http://sbp.teledyn.com/blog/feed/1 (since I am user #1)

once again, though, it would be really useful if this was tied to our events and also once again, maybe after the summer rush, because right now I have a pressing appointment to work out on my tan :)