Now you really can blog from anywhere

I was on Twitter the other day, when I saw a tweet from Paul Scott, looking for volunteers to test a little something called "MXitPress". I was told I'd be able to compose a blog post, send it through MXit or the Google Chat app on my phone, and it would be published on my blog.

At first, I was a bit skeptical about the value of such a service - after all I'm lucky enough to have a BlackBerry that has an app for just about everything I need to do, including blogging. Then it dawned on me - not everyone is lucky enough to have a BlackBerry. More importantly, there's a whole sector of the population that don't even have a smartphone. That's where MXit comes in.

As noted on iGeek, "MXit supports almost any mobile phone on the market and in a country like South Africa where the only way most people are able to access the Internet is through their cellphones, this could be the cheapest way for them publish to the web for all to see."

Enough said.

So how does it work?

STEP ONE: To make it work, you need to have a XMPP client (this is fancy talk for a certain type of instant messaging service)  like MXit or Google Talk on your phone (it works from your desktop too, I tried it) and then you need to  add   This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it as a contact. You'll also need a WordPress or Chisimba based blog - so sorry, no blogspot.commers here!

STEP TWO: Then you need to allow MXit or Google Talk to access your blog and to do this, you'll need to activate Remote Publishing on your blog's dashboard at Settings > Writing and making sure that the XML-RPC setting is ticked.

STEP THREE:  Once you've changed the blog settings, you need to register your blog with the MXit bot, and you'll do this by sending it a register message: register:www.yourdomain.co.za /xmlrpc.php user pass replacing www.yourdomain.co.za with your personal blog address and then your username and password credentials. 

STEP FOUR: You should receive a reply notifying you that registration was successful, and issuing you with instructions on how to publish a blog post. You'll use the command message: blog post title# blog post content. (Obviously this means you put the post title before the # and the post content, after it).

Rating: 5/5: MXitPress is quick to set up and easy to use. Instructions that are issued throughout the process are excellent, and it's an extremely useful thing - being able to blog from anywhere.

What comes next?

This opens many doors for many people by giving them the means to easily (and cheaply) publish their content to the web.  

We're looking forward to attending the launch of the new MXit API next Friday 29th of October 2010 - to see what else is on the horizon for MXit.