Frank on MobileCast

Also in our latest svn drop is the first user visible integration with PodGrove. You can now add feeds to mobilecast via podgrove.com saving you having to type them in on the iphones keyboard. Personally I’ve got pretty used to the iphone keyboard for texting & even doing the occasional email but I’ve always found typing urls into mobilecast tedious (and thats without making typos!).

So to remove the tedium here is what you need to do:

1. Go to www.podgrove.com/main/register where you will see a page like the following:

2. Fill in your email address, password & click sig-up. You should then see something like this:

3. Check your email & click on the link in there to validate your account. That link should take you to a page that looks like this:

4. Click the button “Add PodGrove to Firefox”, This will inturn present a confirmation box where you should click “Yes”. You obviously need to be using Firefox here. This will install a PodGrove content handler for RSS feeds, its just a bit of firefox configuration no fancy plugins, extensions or anything like that.

5. Now when your on the web and you encounter a feed that you’d like to add to MobileCast, you can simply click on the RSS icon (or xml feed) where you should get a standard enough looking page like this:

This is all quite normal & usually this is where you’d make note of the feed url & start typing it into your iphone… However, you’ll notice that in addition to google, bloglines, my yahoo etc you now have an option for PodGrove.com. So select it & click subscribe.

6. Now grab your phone or itouch & fire up the recent version of mobilecast that you grabbed off the downloads page. Click on the “Add Feeds” button, scroll down enter your podgrove username (your email) & password. Then hit the Save button.

7. Click “Add Feeds” again, then click the podgrove “Sync Now” button. A swirly working symbol thingy should appear while mobilecast syncs with podgrove.

8 . Enjoy your newly added podcasts

Please note that once you’ve gone through these 8 steps adding more feeds is simply a matter of repeating steps 5 & 7.

I’m well aware that podgrove needs plenty of UI love (css and what not); it’ll get it in due course… I really wanted to share this as its a feature that I’ve wanted for the longest time!

For the paranoid… PodGrove will not share your email with any other website, service or third party. We will not spam or email you for silly reasons. Your passwords not stored in plain text on podgrove.com (we use a sha1 hash). Having said that the mobilecast client on your phone does store your password in plain text, this is because we are using http basic auth to login to podgrove.

I’m planning a bunch of other services for mobilecast at here PodGrove, next up will most likely be OPML backup… Stay tuned.

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