With my recent purchase of an iPhone, I am addicted to "moblogging," using the camera on the iPhone, and the ability to email photos directly to Flickr over the mobile network.

The essence of "moblogging" is that you're basically "lifecasting," ie: posting content almost as soon as it happens.

Users of the micro-blogging site Twitter have already adopted this trend, with the ability to make quick, short posts using a computer or cell phone. In my case, I also use my iPhone to update my Twitter status.

When I take photos on my iPhone, and upload to Flickr right away, I like to alert my Twitter followers that I've just posted a new photo. Ideally, I want to link them directly to the photo.

Examining a typical Flickr URL for a photo, we can ascertain some important commonalities:

http://flickr.com/photos/matthom/1501358656/

This is a nice clean permanent URL for a photo of mine.

When linking to this photo, I have to copy/paste this URL from the Flickr site into another application. Trouble is, the iPhone doesn't allow for copy/paste. Even worse, I won't know what the URL is (for the most recent photo uploaded) unless I manually visit the Flickr site through Safari on the iPhone. As most iPhone users know, visiting a non-iPhone-optimized site can be a pain over the Edge network.

To compensate, I've created a simple textual page which dynamically pulls all of my Flickr photos, and provides me the most important piece of information: the unique ID of the photo just uploaded.

I already know that all of my photos will start with:

http://flickr.com/photos/matthom/

All I need is that unique number at the very end.

Since the textual page is only text - no images or anything heavy that would require a significant download time, it loads rather quickly, even over the Edge network. It provides me the photo title, date/time uploaded, and unique ID. This is just enough information for me to quickly link to the photo using the iPhone.