Catshanghai

Wordpress and China Mobile don’t make it easy for us PDA bloggers using Windows Mobile 5. Perhaps I am a subset of a subset, but I just want to write an offline message and then put it on the Internet using GPRS if I need to. I want ubiquitous connectivity even if there is no available wi-fi hotspot.

If this message gets through to the blog, then I may have cracked it. This is how.

I went into Wordpress and set up a secret E-mail account that can post direct to the blog. They don’t tell you that you have to setup a cron job to retrieve the messages from the mail server. I know it’s open source, but you would have thought that most people blogging from an Email message would want this done automatically. The work around is to login and go to a special page that will manually download the new post. This sounds like a waste of time to me. That’s enough ranting. I am making progress.

The other problem was GPRS. Handsets bought in China do not support GPRS and wi-fi together out of the box. I had a headache changing the settings on my phone, but I rang China Mobile and they were quite helpful. Here are the main settings I used.

access point name: cmnet
ip address: 10.0.0.172

Username and password are blank

Some handsets require the homepage of http://www.monternet.com , but there was no option for this on my Dopod 838 Pro/HTC Hermes 200.

Now, I have got this to work I am going to intiate a GPRS plan that will save me money for data transfer. At the moment, I am paying 3 jiao for every kb of data transfer. If I pay 20 RMB a month, I get 20 MB of data transfer followed by 1 RMB for every kb.

Update: I have initiated the 100 RMB GPRS plan that entitles me to up to 800 MB a month of data transfer. Wang Jian Shuo thinks that might be over the top, but I’ll degrade the plan if he is correct. It means I am now always connected, which may or may not be a good thing.