Movalog Blog

I have been playing around with Zoto and I'm quite impressed.

Uploading Pictures

One of the things about this service is the ease at which you can upload photos. Just download their client (called Zulu) set it up to scan folders where you put your photos and it'll do the rest for you meaning it scans the folders, makes thumbnails of the images and uploads them ! If you add photos to those folder then the client will pick them up too. I experienced a few problems with the client. It told me it had uploaded all my photos yet when I looked in my account they didn't show up, on uninstalling and reinstall the client they showed up !

Of course you could manually upload them, by selecting the files individually from your computer and uploading them via the web interface. However this is very tedious and I much prefer the ease of Zulu.

The Main Menu "Lightbox"

The main page of your account is called a "Lightbox."

Q: What is a "lightbox"?
A: The term lightbox refers to the group of photo thumbnails on a page. Clicking on a photo in the lightbox takes you to the photo detail page.

The interface, although hard to use without reading up first, is clean. There is a tool bar of links at the top of the page. The links are quite hard to see unless you hover over them - Grey text on a black background ! The sidebar contains links to your blogs, categories and uploads. There is a scrollbar the controls the number of thumbnail pictures that will display on the lightbox. Clicking on a photo in the lightbox will take you to its details page - a page that lists details of the photo including details about the camera and camera settings ! There are keyboard shortcuts available for ease of use !

Setting up MT

Publishing photos to your blog is also easy. The real difficult thing is to setup the blog. At the moment Zoto support Blogger/Movable Type (and Other/Generic as they define it) blogs. On selecting MT, I was presented with a screen that asked for my MT login details and for the "admin URL." I wondered whether it was really secure to give them my information and looked into the docs and found

Q: How do you store my blogging account info?
A: It’s in clear text format in our database. A feature for prompting for your blogging password will be added at a later date.

"Clear Text" means that your login details - ie username, password and location to MT - aren't encrypted and stored. This means if someone gained access to their database they could easily login to your MT install ! Anyways I decided to try it none-the-less and entered in my login details. The only problem was with the "admin url" By admin url I at first thought they meant the url to my mt.cgi file, so I entered that but it didn't work, so then I entered in the url to my mt-xmlrpc.cgi url. That did work - scanning their docs I found no mention of which file I should be pointing Zoto to.