Jezweb Australian Website Design

I've got the blog sorted out so that I can very easily send a new blog article from my phone to the blog.

This process works just as well with an email sent from any device really but the phone is the comms device that i always have with me.

Using the email function of my phone I send an email to a designated email address on my domain

The subject of the email is the title of the blog

The body of the email message is the text and if i attach an image it inserts after the text. Don't seem to be able to send email from my phone with multiple image attachments though.

There is a cron job running on the website that checks the email address for entries and if one with the correct characteristics is in the mailbox then the blog will process it an add to the website.

All works quite neatly and i can see some potential business and sport applications for this in the future.

For example. The dragon boat or outrigger club i could setup so that members can submit their paddling stories via their phone.

Or, a gardening maintenance company could report back to clients and show them that the yard work was complete. We could include some special variables that are read from the email message that designate perhaps the customer id or a job id, or both.

Or, someone on holidays or touring around the country, or internationally, could add blog entries showing up to date info on where they are, what they are doing etc. Which would be kinda neat if you were say on a bike ride across the USA and you wanted to keep friends and family at home up to date on how you are progressing without contacting them individually.

All very simple and very cool and as the handheld communication and computing devices get more sophisticated and easy to use i can see some very clear business cases for using this sort of reporting system.

I've been reading an excellent post by Andy Rutledge on becoming more employable as a web designer and it has really encapsulated some ideas that I've perhaps thought about but never articulated.

I certainly agree that whilst technical ability with applications or programming is not required it would be useful and if one was planning to become an adept software developer or web application developer then familiarity with databases, php, asp and other commonly used technologies would be a big advantage. What Andy was mainly discussing though were people who were aiming for more of a generalist vocation rather than specialising in any one aspect of internet.

From my own experience the key elements to making everything work well and achieve positive outcomes have been:

• work ethic and determination
• strong desire to help people and give them benefit
• able to talk with people and be an active listener
• solid troubleshooting and logic sense
• ability to break down large ideas into manageable blobs
• adept with computers and software methodology
• general understanding of databases, programming and design
• figuring out what people want and getting them talking with questions
• lots and lots of reading books, blogs, magazines
• design principles, how websites work, how search engines work
• how to get people to visit a website, i.e. search, usability, content

Andy presented a quite concise list which at its core were:

• people skills
• artistic creativity
• business acumen
• technology sense

and i very much agree with him.