Uploading photos from moBlog

January 3, 2008 in .NET, Blogging, Code, Pocket PC, Software Development, moBlog
Tags: .NETCF, GData API, MetaWebLog API, Mobile Blogging, moBlog, Photo Blogging, Windows Mobile

The most requested feature for moBlog has been the ability to upload photos from the devices. Since most devices are equipped with a camera it makes perfect sense to enable photo blogging on moBlog as it will give people a quick way to get their photos in the devices to their blogs.

Of the blogging platforms that moBlog the easiest to get photo blogging working on was the on WordPress. WordPress supports Metaweblog API’s newMediaObject method and it worked like a charm. You can see the first photo uploaded from moBlog on the previous post!

Blogger now hosts the photos uploaded to the blogger.com blogs on Picasa Web Albums. The documentation vaguely mentioned something about Blogger creating a default album on Picasa for Blogger photos, but this web album is not accessible via the API. Hence I devised a crude method of creating an album for moBlog and uploading the photos to that album!

But the biggest disappointment was Live Spaces. Though they support Metaweblog API, their support of that is limited. Specifically they do not support the newMediaObject method. That was a pretty bad decision from the Live Spaces team. If they support a particular API, either MetaWebLog API or ATOM API, they have to support it completely. To make matters worse they do not provide any API to upload photos to the Live Spaces Blog.

I know that Windows Live Writer supports uploading photos to Live Spaces blog posts and similar to Google approach, those photos are stored in a seperate album on Live Spaces. But my problem was I was not able to find any documentation on the approach taken by Live Writer.

In any case, a new version of moBlog will be released in a couple of days with photo blogging support on Blogger and WordPress blogs. Along with that I will be releasing a few more enhancements to the post composition screen with the option to decorate the body of the blog posts.

Look forward to an enhanced moBlog!

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile