Blogging by Email

I have kept a personal Blogger account for five or six years now in order to easily share pictures and updates of my girls' activities with our extended and wide-spread family. I have typically sat down at my computer at home to post several items at a time every week or two. Even after I got my first smartphone several years ago, I didn't think about using it to post to my blog.

But recently a few things came together for me:

I upgraded last year to an iPhone 4 and the camera on the phone is SO MUCH BETTER than my old phone, and

I've had a chance to explore mobile social network sharing through accounts with Tumblr and Instagram, and I now know how easy it is to post from my phone.

So I went into my Blogger account in order to turn on email blogging!

In the Email and Mobile Settings, I created a email address specifically for my blog. Anything mailed to that address will be posted to my blog! (Obviously, they recommend that you keep this email private, because anyone with the address could post.)

Then I added that email to my contacts list on my phone. Now when I'm out and about with the girls, I can take a quick picture of them with my phone, and email the picture to the blog right away. The subject line of the email is the blog post title, and the content of the email is the content of the post. I hit send, and in a few minutes there's a new post on the blog!

This is exciting to me because my personal blogging usually has to wait for a week or two (sometimes three or four) before I can set aside enough time for it. I still blog from my computer at home--when I have longer posts or lots of photos that's still the best way to do the work--but now it's easy and fun to send quick items to the blog a couple of times a week. The grandparents and aunts and uncles get more frequent updates, and I have less "backlog" when I do sit down to blog.

It was a good reminder to me, too, that when you have a program or software or whatever that you use all the time, it's worth it to go back every once in awhile and look at all the features with fresh eyes. Something that you didn't have use of when you first started using the program might be just thing thing for you now!