The iPod Touch is here to make life easier. Its easy to get carried away and dive in without thinking through what you're really doing. 

I was really excited about the Squarespace iPhone application, because its the blogging platform that I use, and it streamlines the process of getting the images to my blog post. In the past, I would email the images to myself, download then, them draft my blog on using the Squarespace website. 

This system was streamlined when I began just posting images directly from my iPod. Unfortunately, the names of the files in my iPod are all named photo.jpg. They only get renamed when I download them, then they become photo-1.jpg, photo-2.jpg, etc. 

This is a problem because I have to rename the files when I upload them, or they will conflict with other files that have the same name. Squarespace deals with this by just taking the newest image and replacing every blog post referencing that image with the new image. I got into some trouble blogging about CES with this, and now I have to go back through the blog and replace all occurences of Photo-5.jpg. :-<

Part of why this is still an experiment is because until very recently I still could not say with certainty what the name is of the files while they are on the iPod. Since the full data capability of the Bluetooth is not enabled, I  cannot browse my iPod like a hard drive. I did a test to see what would happened when I blogged from my iPod Touch without having to download the file, a process that renames it.

I discovered a folder called post_images in my Squarespace storage. This is where the squarespace app posts the images that I upload from my iPod Touch using the Squarespace iPhone application. Its cool that it does have a unique name, but if you're not paying attention and you just upload your screengrabs that you emailed yourself, then you'll have redundant file names. It would be nice if Squarespace informed you of this when you upload the photo. But it doesn't. :-(

Not to mention, there is the issue of what to do with those landscape-formatted images. Fortunately, I found an app called Photoflipper, but if I am renaming them for example to keep them organized, I open all the photos at once after I've used the mutliple photo email tool. I use the Apple + L to rotate them all to the left, Apple W to close, then they all get rotated and saved all at once! I can now rename them, and upload them using the Sqaurespace web app from my Macbook Pro laptop.

The problem with uploading from your iPod Touch is that you can't go into your storage folder to see what files you have in there like you can with the iPod Touch app. What about when you have to delete or modify a file? How are you going to find it? 

Granted, you could make a folder in your Squarespace server in order to upload the files there, and avoid some naming conflicts, but if you move the files out of whereever you downloaded them in the process of downloading (something I often do in groups of 5, since this is the limit that the iPod Touch lets me send at a time) then your photos will continue to be named photo.jpg, photo-1.jpg, photo-2.jpg, and it continues this pattern every time you begin to download photos to a given folder. 

Blogging from the iPod Touch is relatively safe, you get unique filenames (I checked by logging into my Squarespace account on the web), and if you use Photo Flipper you can have a pretty easy time with it. The downside is, you can't view or modify your photo files, create widgets, or any of the other features on the Squarespace blogging app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. 

Now that I've ironed out the wrinkles, I think I'll try doing some more posts from the Squarespace app. I'll let you know if I have any more problems!

-iPod Grrl