Blogging while remote. Blogger does have some capabilities to blog say, from your iPhone, or from anything that sends an e-mail in. While I find the idea of blogging by iPhone to be quite awful (like I don’t already have punctuation, spelling, grammar and proof reading issues if I invite Autocorrect to my blog) I can see the application to blogging by e-mail.
With an e-mail I can blog from anywhere I have the internet, right? Well…if you have enough internet to send an e-mail you might as well go ahead and just use the web editor – it’s easier and it all looks right when you are done.
Unless…you are in a situation where your internet connection is so foul, so slow, so archaic that the 1989 version of you would jump up and down and say “Yee-ha, look at that crazy mad download speed.”
What I am talking about of course is sending e-mail via the Single Sideband Radio, or SSB. In my case I am using a ham mail service, but there is Marine SSB e-mail available for a fee as well. Digital communication by Short Wave Radio may be one of the Pinnacles of Nerdvana for many an Amateur Radio Operator…but it is very practical.
For example, the link on the blog to “Where is Evenstar” is updated via SSB radio. Certainly I could pony up for a Spot Tracker and get a subscription for the service to accomplish the same thing. But with the radio I can accomplish the same thing for free, so why pay?
Yes there are limits. If you haven’t guessed it is REALLY slow. You can’t be surfing the web and watching Youtube videos on this thing. But short text e-mails are pretty easy. There is also a limit through Airmail (the Ham e-mail service) of about 100K for each message. So I won’t be e-mailing anyone any lolcats from the high seas.
But what it will let me do is update the blog when I am out of range of land, and beyond all cell phones. Since we do not have a Satphone on board the SSB is how we can stay in touch. So THIS blog post is to test it all out and see how it works, to make sure it works, before I really get out of sight of land.
