Standing in a knitting shop in upstate NY - don’t ask - studying the walls, I spotted this label from afar on an air heating unit. Trent Reznor being one of my favorite musical artists, I was naturally compelled to take a photo.

What I didn’t anticipate seeing were the words “Mercer, Pennsylvania” on the label. You see, that’s precisely where Trent is from, and I’m led to believe that this must be the family business!

Delighted to discover that it wasn’t just a random appearance of the name as I first suspected but is instead “the” Reznor name.

-Roderick
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Sent from the road via Wireless Blackberry
www.roderickrussell.com

Having decided that I needed a decent moblogging solution for my self-hosted WordPress blog, I recently ran tests of several options open to me and my setup.

My needs were simple. While on the road I’m likely to post primarily photos and video with short bits of accompanying text commentary. No need for elaborate layouts, minimal-to-no links included and text commentary is – even with my legendary loquaciousness – usually no more than a few short paragraphs.

Preferring maximum control and self-contained systems, my first choice was of course to keep whichever solution I implemented as close to the core of WordPress as is possible, so naturally I investigated the WordPress-native “Post via E-Mail” solution. Unfortunately the system is, at least at the time of this writing, not handling images terribly well, though passing text through my phone into the system is working flawlessly. Alas, it was really the combination of photos, videos and text that I was interested in, so at this time the WordPress-native solution is not for me.

Just a quick note to readers that in order to support blog submissions from my BlackBerry, I’ve finally upgraded to the latest release of WordPress. The last version was accepting my posts but not posting the entire content. At the recommendation of other users, I’ve upgraded (about time, really) and all works flawlessly.

I should make a quick note about two plugins.

As submissions from my phone while I’m on the road tend to be more whimsical and consist often of nothing more than a photo, I needed a good way to handle media attachments to WordPress via email. Alas, the built-in support is a bit finicky.

Thankfully I was able to locate and install the PostMaster plug-in (http://blog.xforward.com/?page_id=65). So far it’s working perfectly and invisibly and I can recommend it.

Not the best photo quality due to reflection, but the humor isn’t lost…
Such sophisticated humor…