How to Moblog in WordPress and Globe Telecom

The Dilemma:

1. I’m in the Philippines
2. I’m a blogger using WordPress
3. I’m on Globe Telecom
4. I want to moblog (mobile blog)
5. #2 and #3 are giving me a hard time doing #4

In this article I will teach you how to moblog if the above apply to you. The following are some requirements you must accomplish before you can proceed:

1. You must own a cellphone that has multimedia capabilities (such as taking pictures).
2. Your phone must be able to send multimedia messages, if not, ask your provider on how to set it up.
3. You should have shell access to your webhost account.
4. Your webhost should allow you to run cron jobs.

I downloaded a modified version of wp-mail.php, which comes with a typical WordPress installation for the purpose of moblogging but with less features and configurable options. There’s another file called mimedecode.php, which contains several subroutines that the former file needs to run. Download the two files here.

Now, the first thing you have to do is setup a new email address that only you will know about. I created mine through my webhost account panel at Dreamhost.com. This should also work on a Gmail account because they allow remote (pop) access. Yahoo!, on the other hand, makes you pay for this.

Call the email address something weird and personal that’s easy to remember. Some examples:

“ishotthesheriff@domain.com”
“ilikefastcars@mydomain.com”
“iselllivestock@myurl.com”

When you’re finished, access your WordPress admin panel and click on Options > Writing. Under “Writing by e-mail” enter your mail server (e.g. mail.domain.com, pop.myurl.com), your login name and password. Beside “Default post by mail category” choose the default category to which you want your messages to fall under. I suggest that you create a separate category called “Moblog” (or similar) and assign it as the default.

Next, you have to make WordPress accept messages that you send through your cellphone. To do that, you need to create a new user aside from your current one. Click on Users > Authors & Users. Under the Add New User heading, fill up the form with a new Nickname and email. The email address should be something like:

63917XXXXXXX@myglobe.com.ph

Replace the X’s with your number.

Then, open up your shell account via telnet (Start > Run > type “telnet domain.com”) to setup a new cron job. Follow these steps:

1. Type “crontab -e” to edit your crontab file.
2. Type “*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php /home/user/domain.com/wp-mail.php” — */15 means that the file wp-mail.php will run every 15 minutes to check your mail if there are new messages to post.
3. Press Ctrl-X to Exit.
4. Press Y to save.
5. Press Enter.
6. Type “crontab -l” to confirm.
7. Close Telnet.

Open up wp-mail.php and look through the options under /* USER VARIABLES */. I stronly suggest that you keep all of the variables intact. Do not change anything if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Start your FTP client. In the root folder of your WordPress installation, create two new folders called “wp-photos” and “wp-files”. Staying in the same root folder, upload wp-mail.php and mimedecode.php.

Now, send a test message to your “secret” email address through your cellphone. Create a new multimedia message and set the recipient to that email address. Insert a picture of your choice from your gallery. In the message area, type:

**Message Subject*** Message Body yada yada yada etc.

The text in between the *’s will be assigned as the subject of your post.

Wait for the next 15-minute interval (e.g. 12:00, 12:15, 12:30) and see if your test message came through. If you experience any problems, don’t hesitate to ask me right here.

Happy Moblogging!