If you haven’t noticed the low-res image in the sidebar, I caved and got myself a camera-equipped cellphone over the weekend.

I’ve already set up a moblog on TextAmerica. I can send a picture as a message from my phone to a special email address, and it automatically gets posted to the site. They were even nice enough to provide an RSS feed for the pictures, so you can include data from the moblog on any other site, like this one. They had a Javascript file that you could use to do it more automagically, but:

  1. the link opened in another window.
  2. the link was to the moblog homepage, not the larger image of the thumbnail picture used for the link
  3. you didn’t see descriptive text (if there was any).
  4. there was a TextAmerica ad button below the image.

So, being a programmer, with some help from an article from Scott Mitchell, I used the RSS feed to extract all the data I needed, and created the link and description text myself. I’m even caching the data once a minute so the page doesn’t have to wait for the image data each time.

There are some other neat things besides the camera. I can put my own photos on the phone, as wallpaper or startup/shutdown screens. I can also put pictures as CallerID notifications, so when Ryan calls, his face comes up.

My 2nd-most favorite feature has to be downloadable ring tones. I admit, I thought that ringtones were stupid; everyone just getting the latest song from 40 cent or whatever. But take a look at some of the ringtones that are available! The Alternative section is a bit thin, but still has good stuff in it; Stone Roses, etc. Right now my ringer is “Let’s go to bed” by The Cure.