Aral Balkan

I decided to take things easy yesterday, after a tiring but very successful two weeks with the Hands On courses (more on that later) and hack up my blog so I could post pictures and videos to it from my phone (a Nokia 7610 I got so I could play with FlashLite on it before deciding that life is just too short to go back to writing anything in Flash 4 syntax.)

I started out by integrating Stefan Hellkvist's excellent MMS Diary module into the site -- initially thinking I'd have the Moblog as a separate section. I got that working (you can see it here) but quickly realized that it would be a shame that my posts wouldn't show up in the FlashAnt RSS and that users couldn't comment on them. I could have hacked said functionality into the new module but I didn't want to duplicate what b2 already does (or create a Frankenstein's monster of sorts) so I decided to full integrate the MMS/moblog feature into b2. It was actually not too difficult.

I had it working (at around 2am last night) to the point where I posted a test video (don't ask -- it was late!) and a test image and then hit the sack... Only to wake up to six posts (or was it eight?) this morning. Apparently, there's something wrong with the response my phone is getting that makes it think that the MMS was unsuccessful and the phone queues these unsuccessful attempts for resend. In effect, my phone kept spamming the site every so often, throughout the night!

My apologies to any aggregators this may have messed with. I should have the response message working correctly this morning so that won't happen again!

In the process of integrating MMS Diary into b2, I was able to add a few neat features to it. In the Moblog-as-separate section version, I added paging and in general I hacked it so it can now show 3gpp Video correctly (you need the Quicktime plugin to view it) instead of just saving it out as an unknown ".bin" file. Also, I implemented a primitive form of security, whereby you need to send a passcode with your message so that not anyone can use your gateway to post to your blog.