Ruben Puentedura ponders the use of a smartphone to not just consume content, but also to create it. And that got me thinking how I could adapt that idea to my own BlackBerry Storm in some type of platform independent way. There used to be a handy service through FeedDemon that made it easy to read RSS feeds from both my mobile phone and multiple computers and bookmark them for later use. It was a really handy way to collect ideas and then reference or blog post on them later. But one of the hazzards with any such service is it may disappear, as the FeedDemon service did (the desktop software still exists but with a Google Reader backend.) Delicious is another way to collect websites, but I can’t find an easy way to use it via mobile, and it is still too limited. I want to collect everything — tweets, images, websites and random thoughts all in one place — and in a place under my complete control.
On my phone the one common menu setting that appears in all the content areas is “email this”. Which got me thinking — what it I set up a WordPress notebook site that I can use to collect all these items. WordPress does have a core feature that allows posting via email, but it doesn’t offer much flexibility. To be really useful I want to be able to categorize and tag my posts with code in the email. A little digging turned up POSTIE, which seems to do the trick. I might also set it up to auto-pull my tweets — that way I’d only need to manually send tweets from people I follow to keeps as notes. Now I just need to get an email account setup on my hosting account (forgot the admin password — hello tech support!) and I’ll be in business.
In concept this site allows me to collect all kinds of random scraps of content and feed it into a common content management system that I can use later. I don’t care if other people can see my stuff, and in some cases it might actually be helpful. The system uses probably the most common and ubiquitous of internet technologies, email. And it collects in a resource that I own and can control at my whim — not that of some faceless web 2.0 flavor-of-the-month. The real proof of usefulness is in the using — so we’ll see how it builds, and how easy it is to incorporate it into daily activity. But I’m hoping notebook.rodeworks.com might turn out to be a really useful personal note keeping resource.
Ruben R. Puentedura’s Weblog: The Lively Sketchbook
…provide a rich set of tools for analysis and creation across a broad range of scenarios throughout K-20 education. After a couple of months of testing multiple apps in combination with each other, I found that this was indeed possible… the
question is whether the app is designed in such a way that it functions in notebook/sketchbook-like fashion, with the same grace and ease of use that one might expect from its paper-based counterpart.
Postie offers many advanced features for posting to your blog via e-mail, including the ability to assign categories by name, included pictures and videos, and automatically strip off signatures. It also has support for both imap and pop3, with the option for ssl with both. For usage notes, see the other notes page
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Randall Rode's online home for thoughts, notes, and experiments with a wide range of technology topics. Visit the about page for info on my recent projects and professional background. I welcome your comments!
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