listen to africa

Quite a few people have been in touch saying they’re only getting two lines on some posts and asking if they’re missing something. A few others are asking how we’re integrating Twitter into the website so they can do the same. And a couple have asked how we’re updating our location every day. I thought I’d explain how it all works.

Because we’ll often be away from internet access and electricity for long stretches at a time, we sometimes update the website by text message, from our mobile phone. The easiest way to do this is by using a service called Twitter so, every time you see a blog post with the author ‘Twitter’, it will have been sent from our mobile phone (and will be short – 140 characters or less).

We’re only turning this on when we think we’ll be away from the internet for a while, so only some of our text messages are appearing on the website. If you want to follow all of our text message updates (Tweets), you can sign up to Twitter and then follow @listentoafrica.

For the techier folk, we’re using a WordPress plugin, Twitter Tools, to do this. It can pull every Tweet, daily digests or weekly digests of your Tweets into your blog or sidebar, and gives you the option to send a Tweet every time a new blog post is created.

We’re also using our mobile phone to send daily location updates to our map, home page and sidebar. To do this, we text our GPS coordinates to a service called Brightkite. Brightkite converts each location into a place name and outputs a georss feed, which we’re then pulling into various places on the website using a bit of coding and the iBrightKite WordPress plugin.

Finally, we’ll also be using the mobile to send occasional website updates by email, using WordPress’s built-in post by email function. These updates will be longer than the Twitter updates but will still have no images.