I finally got myself a mobile phone to test and finish the mobile publishing and blogging software platform which I had to stop last October due to lack of device to test it.

Sony Ericsson m600i is using Opera for Mobiles version 8 browser and I was surprised that SVG clips where working properly, however XSLT formatting wasn’t yet implemented.

So, to get the product work I had to find a server side XSLT parser so tested some of those. With Sablotron and Saxon, I had need to compile the source code and without a computer it was impossible so I found LibXSLT and LibXML PERL libraries so tested to use those.

With some simple lines of code I wrote a function which will convert my XML database to HTML using XSLT file within my PERL script. The only problem was that if I have an error in XSLT or XML file it would end up server error 500 without any other error code or message, so I had to be careful using it. Decided that HTML files should be created during XML database files modification and creation process rather than passing all browser requests thru parser. Otherwise I could lose my search engine visibility which had been extremely good.

As it was open to publish any new content for everyone since October, I had collected few thousand new pages containing links to porn sites and gained top positions in search engines for several porn related keywords reaching hundreds of visitors per day.

I think the idea using XML directly with proper tag names has caused it for the reason that search engines are using XML themselves so no conversion from HTML to XML wasn’t necessary. However, now still publishing HTML format this advantage could be lost until mobile browser developers will implement XSLT formatting. I think, it will work now with Apple iPhone and Opera 9 for mobiles should support it. Nokia’s browser is based on Open Source so it takes time to get somebody willing to write something for free these days.

From this heavy usage, I had discovered few bugs and find out that when RSS feed and sitemap files are too large (in megabytes), I can loose some data when modifying those in my PERL script and the result file won’t be well formatted XML files anymore.

Realistically no blog will have thousands of pages so I wasn’t much worried about that.

Also RSS feed format was not supporting HTML tags in item description field so I had to modify my script to remove those and cut the RSS content size to 255 characters. Otherwise no-one won’t visit my page as they could read it using RSS reader and I will loose my revenue source.

The problem was still to find a Rich text editor to support necessary set of the HTML tags.

I got an offer to use Symbian Text Editor conversion utility to HTML as basis but to implement it fully as part of Mobile Blogging platform will need around few weeks of C++ programmer work.

Without a computer I can’t do it and my C++ skills are rusty anyway. It has been over twenty years when I used it. But so far I haven’t found any programmer willing to do it free of charge and without any money, I can’t afford to hire a programmer either so it should wait better times.

I changed the editor to text area field and used some buttons to generate necessary HMTL for headers (H1-H3), bold, italic, underline, and link, image tags in JavaScript. It worked well in PC browser but didn’t work in my mobile as it didn’t recognised proper position or selected area and was creating those tags at the beginning of the text.

Otherwise publishing directly from mobile phone was working as unique alternative for any truly mobile blogger.

Bango had meanwhile introduced lower cost entry programs for their global billing solution where you will get out only 20%-30% of earned revenues but do not have to pay their monthly fees around £600.

Besides integration with Bango billing, I integrated Bango social bookmarking features thru WAP.COM.

It could have been more convenient for end user if I could have possibility to create Bango URL id’s directly from my application as currently you need to create Bango ID, setup the page using my content publishing entering it as parameter and then configure Bango again to redirect to this page including the setup of billing parameters if decided to charge for the content.

And there is no mobile browser access to do it from Bango site so you still need to visit public library for that after you have published your article using mobile device.

Besides content billing I wanted to integrate my software with some mobile Ad network, like Google Adsense is for the Internet. AdMob was the biggest of those but they didn’t have any suitable code for my needs. They support only php, asp, Rugby Rails, etc but no simple XML or URL parameters.

I found AdModa which had simple URL parameter interface so any publisher can now earn extra money from ad clicks in banners. Mostly those banners are adult related, so again porn industry is very innovative to use new marketing possibilities.

I wrote a simple setup routines and setup page, where you enter your site parameters including AdModa publisher and region id and it will setup the blogging site for you so you can immediately publish first page. As mentioned before, for payable content you need to have Bango content ID before publishing first and you need to setup the redirection afterwards until we somehow will get Bango’s monthly fees sorted out.

For media content, the page can contain embedded images, SVG animations and mobile video which were most convenient way to implement it. It works fine with Opera browser, but Nokia and iPhone browsers have their limitations especially using SVG. I have no idea what the Adobe Flash Lite current situation on those is but I assume that Adobe hasn’t done well.

Anyway, I’m currently seeking mobile blogging partners that maybe together we can cover Bango’s professional program monthly fees and get better payout rates. I registered the mobiblogi.com name so if you are interested, I could setup your community at yourname.mobiblogi.com address and host it for small fee.

Together we could make money, type wap.mobiblogi.com from your mobile browser.