I first started blogging back in 2007. But did you ever know that I ran and still do so solely using my phone ? My first blog was Aviation Sri Lanka ( which was later on developed into Aero Everyday ) and it was started in Q1 2007. At the time I had finished one of my school exams and was at home, my phone was a Sony Ericsson V600i and I didn’t own a PC . My sole connectivity to the internet was my phone’s GPRS connection. I purchased a Nokia 6233 in the middle of 2007. Then, in December 2007, I started Mobile Royale . At that time it was named ‘ Sri Lankan Mobile News ‘ and was hosted on Blogger Blogspot. Soon after, my blog was renamed into ‘ Mobile Royale ‘ . My provider had just started 3.5G coverage to where I live and I was running three blogs, a forum and a few more personal sites using my sole tool – Opera Mini on Nokia 6233 . I’v been a long time user of Opera Mini and had literally mastered it. However I used to regularly post to my sites using the ‘ Email to post ‘ system on Blogger. I didn’t have a domain, it was just a subdomain – I didn’t have cash and was solely wirelessly blogging, but I wanted a domain . I found the best alternative Dot TK ( although it didn’t offer you the ability to set meta tags for your site, thus reducing SEO ), and renamed my blog into www.mobileroyale.tk , via which you can still access this site to date . It was at this time that my primary blog, Mobile Royale, started getting popular and traffic started to increase . At that time, I had started contributing to Phat^Trance’s Daily Mobile and I decided to experiment with WordPress by starting a secondary WordPress.com edition of Mobile Royale, because it seemed more eye candy on Opera Mini’s Mobile View !! WordPress however proved to be better than expected and in order to have more control over my blog I wanted to move my blog to WordPress. I knew that WordPress.org, ie- installing WordPress on a site hosted of my own – was the best solution. But here I am – Never owned or used a PC, stuck solely with my mobile and no unlimited data connections ! I was still under 18 too, so how come I pay for hosting and install WordPress on my own ? I searched and searched and searched to no avail, but finally found a solution thanks to blogs of two great guys ( probably from India, whose names I’ve forgotten now, sadly ) – Use a free hosting site with an automatic scripts installer and use a CO.CC domain . So I registered the domain, www.mobileroyale.co.cc, still via my beloved Opera Mini and hosted the domain on a certain free web hosting service and installed WordPress via their scripts installer . However, the host seemed to be having too much problems and soon my site started experiencing unexpected high levels of downtime . At one point, the host’s server crashed and all the content on my blog was lost. I was on a mobile, I didn’t have any unlimited data connection to save my files ( and didn’t have much space too, with my 512MB MicroSD already filled out ) and Mobile Royale seemed to have come to its end. But, luckily it wasn’t . I already had a secondary WordPress.com site and I had imported my posts on Blogger to this WordPress.com site via WordPress’s automatic importer. So I decided that enough was enough and and moved my site to a better place, 000 Web Host where I found a bigger bandwidth, a better reliability and it is where I still host my site to date. I waited a few days for DNS to propagate and moved my domain to 000Web Host and still I was stuck with a problem – I had hundreds of posts to bring into my new WordPress installation via a WXR file ( WXR – WordPress eXtended RSS, similar to XML, because free hosts usually don’t support secure SSL socket connections etc and I’m unable to import my posts directly into the new installation from Blogger ) and it was 600KB of size, which I COULD NOT AFFORD since GPRS was not cheap and certain other stuff. This is where Phat^Trance came to rescue, taking all the hassle of composing and decomposing the WXR file to fit the size approved by the new host and helping me to import them to my new installation and bringing Mobile Royale back to life. He deserves a load of thanks ! Soon on, I found a few new writers to my blog, but most of them did not actually become active except for one great writer – that was JBPseudo, whose articles are most of the most read at Mobile Royale, although unfortunately he is no longer active with us. At the time, I had my first S60, an N95 sent from WOM World to trial, with me and I tried to experiment various S60 apps that supported posting to WordPress, from Scribe to Wavelog to Wordmobi, but none seemed as easy or sure shot as my favourite – Opera Mini . Today I use WPhone plugin on WordPress and directly post using Opera Mini . My WordPress installation runs the latest version and I have a large number of plugins running too. How did I do that ? I use two WordPress plugins called Automatic Upgrade and One-Click Installer which do upgrading the installation and installing plugins automatically using server side infrastructure and I’d recommend these tools even to a PC Blogger. My dad fell ill in recent times and as you all know because world economics are not so smooth too, I was unable to pay for GPRS anymore and this caused Mobile Royale to be inactive for more than a month recently. I wrote to all the four ( and to Airtel too, making it five ) mobile networks in Sri Lanka asking to support me, in exchange for advertising at my blog – none cared and I got at least a mere response only from Dialog and Airtel of which only Dialog had at least talked nice . But last December, just in time to celebrate Mobile Royale’s first anniversary, Dialog Telekom decided to offer me a free unlimited data connection on my mobile for a few months, in exchange for NOTHING . Dr. Hans Wijayasuriya, Group CEO of Dialog Telekom and COO of TM International – probably the most qualified, most successful and most respected executive in Sri Lanka – considered it as a Social responsibility of the company and helped me like a god taking all the hassle in processing the connection . Although the free connection would end soon and I would again go through some hardship, I will never forget his helps and must be thankful always. Mobile Royale has come a long way being set up, run and written from a mobile and I’m proud about where it is today. Mobile Royale is still run from my mobile including all my other blogs, forums, forums where I participate and all my online life. There are a large number of people who have helped me all the way, but mainly, Steve Litchfield from AAS – it is not wrong to call him my mobile guru and he’s probably the person who has helped me the most in this blogosphere and undoubtedly is the most generous blogger I’ve ever met – may you live long Steve ! Phat^Trance from DailyMobile – a good blogging friend, in true Swedish style Rita El Khoury, aka Dotsisx from Symbian-Guru – has helped me since I started, a good friend and a good doctor Teo, aka Apocalypso – all of you know him, the pioneering force behind Symbian-Freak but down to earth than you’ll ever expect Eldar Murtazin of Mobile-Review.com- our beloved Eldar from Russia, the undisputed leader in all kinds of S60 revelations JBPseudo – my first co-author, from India Ravindra from SymbianStories.com WOM World My family and friends .. and to everyone who has ever helped me by even a single word. When I finish writing this, it brings a tear to my eyes – it is a teardrop of happiness and sadness writing out from the teardrop island, a happiness for being able to thank ever

yone who supported me and a sadness for the feeling of fear, that WOM World would probably see this article and ask me back for THEIR N95 which I’ve been allegedly keeping with me – it was my first S60, the device that taught me about S60 ( will you believe if I say that I didn’t know the S60 menu key when it first came to me but that now I can completely overhaul the OS ? ) and probably my last S60 if they take it away from me, because there is noone to buy me a new S60 as my dad is now disabled and I’m poor . I wish if some official from Nokia read this and decided to let me have the three and half years old N95, one of the first ever production units . But the device does a great job in helping me running three blogs, managing their FTP stuff ( via SIC FTP ), imaging, communicating, being my personal assistant, helping with my studies and an unbelievable limitless workload that you can ever imagine from an S60. Thanks everyone for the support, I expect it from you in the future too ! Disclaimer : All the links in this post have been added as means of thanking only and the author would like to convince that none of them are paid links.

UPDATE: Now this site is hosted by Alireta, who as you can see below in the comments, was kind enough to offer me some free hosting. In the meantime, I have mastered WordPress, CSS and SEO to a considerable extent and still continue to blog from the good old N95. I do not use WPhone anymore, except when I have long posts to publish, since I need more control over administration and in order to fill the custom fields required by my current theme framework, Hybrid ( which really is excellent ). However I have some hope towards updating this site into the Thesis framework, for which unfortunately I do not have enough cash. Now I use a little nice S60 application called HTML Editor to compose posts on my phone and publish them. I am really grateful to WOM World, without whom Mobile Royale would have never come this far.
Thanks for reading !

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