One of my obsessions over the past few years has been to try and reduce my travel technology down to a couple of items — namely a smart phone (Treo 680) and a digital camera (Panasonic FZ5).

The Treo 680 contains all my travel information and contact details and on the road I also use it to browse the Internet and to send and receive emails. I also write stuff and send it out in MSWord format with the help of Documents to Go and my Palm Wireless Keyboard.

With a program called CallRec I can record anything from a phone conversation to the sound of a Indian Sitar. And with an 8GB SD-card full of ebooks and music and a video or two it also helps keep me occupied.

I’ve found my Treo to be so versatile I rarely need to travel with a laptop any more.

WordPress is a wonderfully versatile piece of sotfware with an on-line community that is vibrant, helpful and interesting. It’s the software that runs this site.

I’ve been trying to get this mobile blogging stuff happening for a few days now and I reckon I’ve tried probably every piece of blogging software available for the Treo 650.

The best was the latest beta version of a program called mo:Blog. It had everything I wanted but it caused my Treo to constantly reboot and I didn’t think I wanted to be in India with a phone that had totally hung. So now I have the slightly less functional but equally impressive and free u*Blog installed. As I mentioned it’s not quite as versatile but it seems rock solid and will do 85% of what I was looking for — which mostly revolved around category stuff. I’m also going to have another look at Plogit an Open-Source PalmOS blogging client that I think will retrieve posts so they can be updated or edited after they’ve been posted.

I also thought I’d try sending posts via e-mail (which I can do easily from my Treo as long as I have a cell) — that worked even better and since I’m won’t be posting photos I decided to stick with the vanilla WordPress solution and not go down the Postie plugin route — I was having formatting issues using Postie anyway.

So, this post is being written on my Treo 650 using a Palm Wireless Keyboard and the standard VersaMail email program that comes with the package. I will then e-mail it to my WordPress blog, and a few minutes later, thanks to wp-cron-mail, it will show up live for the world to read.

At least that’s what’s supposed to happen when I press the send button

It all happened as expected — I have since used my laptop to added the links and fixed a couple of typos.

Last week I bought a ticket to India. I’ve been there twice before and enjoyed it very much, although I will admit that India pushes quite a few of my buttons.

In 2003 and again in 2005 I stayed mostly in the South near Mysore in a place called Bylakuppe. I enjoyed staying-put and having the same bed to sleep in each night. Maybe it’s an age thing, but the thought of packing my bags every few days and moving-on has really lost its appeal. I sometimes got bored but for me that was part of the trip — staying in one place and experiencing the people and the community.

This time I am going to Varanasi in North India and will stay there for about 2 weeks, then travel to Bodh Gaya for a week and then back to Varanasi to catch a flight to Kathmandu, Nepal, also for a week.

I’m leave soon and I’ve started a blog category ‘on the road’ to chronicle this trip and maybe a few others if this mobile blogging thing works and I enjoy it.

At the moment I can’t quite make my mind up whether to blog via my Treo and email using the WordPress Postie plugin or whether to use the free blogging software u*Blog on my Treo. There are pros and cons for both and for me neither of them seems perfect. Maybe in the end it will all be a tad too hard. We’ll see!

My experiment over the past 18 months to reduce my travel technology down to a couple of items — namely a Treo 650 and a camera — has just taken another jump forward with the addition of some blogging software.

My Treo already contains all the info and contact details I need. When I’m on the road I use the Treo to browse the internet and to send and receive emails. Plus, I can write stuff in MSWord format with the help of Documents to Go and my Palm Wireless Keyboard. With a program called CallRec I am also able to record anything from a phone call to the sounds of a Tibetan Buddhist chant and the 5 or 6 ebooks and music I load help keep me occupied on the plane. I’ve found the Treo 650 to be so versatile I no longer even consider taking a laptop with me when I travel.

To add to the list I recently discovered some software that will allow me to blog while I’m on the road as well. The software is called mo:Blog and I have written and posted (some) of this short article using it. I’ll tell more as I learn, but for now let me say it was easy to set up for my WordPress blog and write and send this first post. There is another program called u*Blog. It’s freeware and so far it seems to be working just as well as mo:Blog.

I always enjoy finding a good use of technology. Yesterday I discovered a a site called iJourneys that offers downloadable audio tours for Paris, Rome, Florence, Venice and Pompeii.

Basically, you download one of their audio guides load it on your MP3 player and then it’s just you and your headset as you stroll around the city, in your own time and at your own pace.

Get me a ticket to Venice.

Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain, was their technology and like some of ours it allowed them to sacrifice people to appease their God. Technology is this weeks Photo Friday assignment.

god’s chosen
slay god’s children
a deathly silence on high

Haiku by soji.