As the webmaster here at the J-School, I’ve been looking for the easiest and most effective way to get images off student phones and into the Movable Type system as weblog entries. While there are a number of external services that get the job done if you’re willing to let them host your content, we wanted something we could run on our own web server — our scripts, our backup systems, our customizations.
While I have not yet found the holy grail, I have concluded that mfop2 gets us as close as possible to our goal for now. With mfop2, students email images from their phones to a special address maintained by mfop. We have accounts set up on mfop’s server. When a student emails an image from a phone, they include an ID and password in the message body. The mfop server compares that login data to its database of user accounts and thus knows on which remote server to post the image and blog entry. In the end, both the image and the post itself are stored on our server. mfop merely processes the incoming data.
mfop’s main developer has confirmed for me that it should be possible to make his processing script generic enough to run on any web server, then offer it for download by webmasters. In the meantime, there have been plenty of hints that Movable Type Pro will include moblogging capabilities out of the box. Hopefully we won’t have to wait much longer for that.