When I was on holiday to Thailand, Sydney and Melbourne I was without a laptop[1] and consistent Internet access. But I had my iPhone, WiFi and a few little things that made minimal connectivity a little easier.
WiFi
Quite a few hotels in Thailand seem to provide free secure WiFi. Either contact reception for the username and password, or check the documentation in your hotel room. It’s not going to be terribly fast, and in some (several?) cases, unreliable, but it’ll be enough to check your email, social networks and RSS feeds.
While we were in Phuket, the sheer number of B&Bs and hostels around also ensured I was able to score some free and unsecured WiFi action when I was out and about. Again, slow and kinda sketchy, but better than nothing and gave me something to do while waiting for food or just chilling out.
In Australia you’re kind of stuffed with that. Free WiFi isn’t that prevalent, though you might get some services in places like McDonalds or Borders. I managed fine with the modest data quota that comes with my phone plan, but I cut back on my youtube usage just in case.
Read It Later
When I came upon an article or site that I wanted the luxury of reading on a sensible-sized screen at my convenience, internal Safari bookmarks just doesn’t cut it. I am presuming you can sync bookmarks between Safari mobile and Safari regular, but I use Firefox primarily and the idea of syncing bookmarks like that makes me a little queasy.
This is where a Read It Later account comes in handy. It’s like a hosted bookmark service, but for bookmarks which are more than likely transient, unlike your regular bookmarks which you’ve intentionally kept for future reference. I don’t use it very efficiently since it ends up being a dumping ground, but it serves its purpose as an inbox for bookmarks which don’t yet deserve pride of place in your actual bookmarks.
If you download the Read It Later app for iPhone, it provides instructions for how to add a bookmarklet to Safari so you can add those pending reading articles in-browser. The bookmarklet lives in Safari’s bookmarks, and when you want to save a page to Read It Later, click the bookmark and the javascript it contains does some magic… et voilà.
Tumblr
Obviously, I like to Tumble. And one thing the iPhone Tumblr app doesn’t seem to do[2] is allow you to reblog. There’s also no easy way, that I have found, to add the Tumblr bookmarklet to Safari the way Read It Later does.
When I first added the Read It Later bookmarklet, the process was rather painful. You had to press and hold on a link, tap Copy to copy the javascript and paste it into a bookmark.
I tried to do the same thing to the bookmarklet on the Tumblr Goodies page, but they cunningly overrode that by adding a javascript pop-up telling you to drag it to your bookmarks. Which you can’t do, because click-and-drag isn’t a valid interaction on the iPhone. ~_~
Frustratingly, the only way I could get the bookmarklet’s script contents was to wait until I had access to an actual computer, copy and paste the javascript into an email, open the email on the iPhone and copy the text from there to paste it into the bookmark.
Fortunately, you don’t have to go through as much pain as I did. There’s still a little pain involved, but if you want to add the bookmarklet to your iPhone (or other similar device, I’ve added the bookmarklet to a snipt.
- Browse to that page, copy the text from “javascript:” to “void(0)” in the snippet box. You’ll have to copy it the iPhone way because the snipt “copy” link doesn’t work on the iPhone.
- Create a new bookmark called “Share on Tumblr” and save it.
- Click on the bookmarks icon and edit your “Share on Tumblr” link, delete the address currently associated with the link and tap Paste to paste the text you copied in step 1.
Once you have this set up, when you want to reblog a page, click the “Share on Tumblr” bookmark and a new window will pop up with the familiar Tumblr bookmarklet interface.
I cannot begin to tell you how helpful it was to have both Read It Later and the Tumblr bookmarklet on my iPhone while I was away.
In any case, I hope this helps someone else to stay connected, even though they should be disconnecting if they’re on holiday. :P
[1] Well, technically I had my laptop with me in Sydney and Melbourne for work. But the display died halfway through the trip.
[2] That I know of.
