David Davies' Radio Weblog

A little under a year ago I started a Manila weblog that had an unusual method of posting:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/radio-userland/message/7733

I could post to my blog from just about anywhere just so long as I had my mobile phone with me. You see in the UK (I don't know about anywhere else) it's common from network operators to offer an SMS to email gateway. That way, any SMS text message can be routed to email and therefore picked up using any email client. This allowed me to write a script in Manila to check for emails sent from my phone and post them to my weblog home page. This was great and worked for me. I even blogged my way through a soccer match:

http://smsblog.ManilaSites.Com/2001/03/10

Very neat!

But this had one major flaw. You had to either be running Frontier and Manila or at least have access to a Manila server to install my scripts. This obviously ruled out most people so I guess this was bit of a nice idea but not much use to anyone.

Then came Radio userland (http://radio.userland.com/).

Now that Userland have started a desktop web server revolution with Radio Userland 8.0 anyone can use this great method of posting. Just think of the applications. You can blog on holiday, you can blog on the road, you can blog from the middle of a field. You choose. You can really document your every day life, if you want to!

The weblog is definitely a new way of writing and turns everyone into a publisher. Maybe tools like Radio Userland, SMS and other forms of mobile blogging are going to make it just that bit more immediate.

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 19:05:31
I wanted to be able to post to this weblog using both email and my SMSmobile phone and I wanted to be able to show which method I was using by wayof a blogging record. So I put a little check in my email blogging script toselect the appropriate icon. So here goes, my first email post. So nowyou'll know!

Sat, 12 Jan 2002 18:47:45
Seems Steve Hooker has discovered SMS blogging now. Go Steve! Have you figured out how to add a graphic yet?

Yay, Radio Userland 8.0 is out and running on my Mac.