I do a lot of international traveling for my job and I’m always taking photos with my iphone of cool signs I see. I would like to start a “sign website” where I can take a photo of a sign and have it go directly to my website, can this be done? Any advice appreciated.
Yes, this can be done quite easily. Are you looking at doing this with an on-deck iOS application or a mobile site that you want to browse to with you iPhone and then upload?
Both will require a website/server to host the files. I think it would probably make more sense to make it a mobile site. You can use any language, be it PHP / ASP.NET or anything else. You can just put a normal form on with an file input. Your iPhone or any other smart or feature phone should also be able to handle it.
If you need help with the mobile sites, you can post questions in the threads of the language you using, as it will be a normal website, with maybe just a mobile design. But will work as a normal website
That being said, im sure there are free services out there that do just this. Maybe look at that?
Good luck
Thanks, the only thing I’ve programmed is a website(Joomla) and that’s not really programming. What’s the difference between a mobile website and a regular website? Any advice on what programming applications I should get started with? Thanks.
Basically the only difference between smartphone only websites and normal sites are the design. If you want to do mobi sites that are for more phones, like old nokia feature phones, etc. Then there is a specific mobile xhtml standard that needs to be adhered to. As to what programming applications, that depends on what language you want to code in. ASP.NET and C#, PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc.
This will come down to personal preference and/or server requirements
I can learn computer stuff pretty fast, what program do you suggest for a newbie?
Well, I am biased towards Visual Studio and ASP.NET. You can download a version for free from microsofts website. And Visual Studio is by far the best programming IDE ever made. And there are tons of online tutorials etc to help you learn.
Try starting at http://www.asp.net/learn
Flickr has a program called Shozu where your images are instantly uploaded. I guess this is the exact thing I’m trying to do but with my own website. Does anyone know what programming language Flickr was designed in? Or Shozu? Thanks.
Anything on the iPhone is Objective-C at the end of the day. And it doesn’t matter what flicker is programmed in – you would use their HTTP API (which is easily used from iOS) to send/tag photos.
Anyhow, you are already on the right path here – what you really want to do is build an app that uses someone’s photo service to host pictures (flickr) and build a website that pulls the hosted photos over (if you want to go that far).
Your saying build my own website(PHP?) and go through flickr to have the photos come to my site? I really don’t want to use Flickr at all I want my own website, for example I build a site and if Shozu likes it and wants to partner with me the photographer would use Shozu to send the photos to my website. The question is what program to I begin with to build the website. Thanks for everyone’s input, really appreciate it.
Hi FHASSW,
At the end of the day it doesn’t matter which language you use to make a website, you can get the same result with any of them. They all produce HTML and write to the file system so what you use is down to personal choice.
If you want to throw something up quickly, I’m always a big fan of Rails. A photo sharing site is a pretty simple thing to code. If you were happy to use the scaffold generators you could put something together in an hour. The user would take a photo, visit your site, browse for the photo, then click submit to send it over. Twitter is written in Rails.
PHP would also be a good option. It’s a nice newbie language and you can scale it pretty far. Facebook is written in super optimised PHP.
As for an iphone app, that’s a different kettle of fish. As wwb_99 says, you’d need to learn Objective C, which imo is not the prettiest language by a long shot. Then you’d need to pay Apple £50 for a developer licence to get it listed in the app store. You’ll also need a Mac to develop on. Apple’s developer tools don’t run on Windows.
An Android app is easier. You can build in Java and you can distribute it how you like. Eclipse runs on any platform from Windows to Ubuntu. It’s generally a much nicer platform to develop for, though I think the market is not as large.
Good luck with it. If you’re just starting out I suggest you make something simple, maybe just some PHP that reads and writes to and from an images folder allowing uploads and composing a page from the contents of the folder. Don’t try to run before you’ve learned to walk.
If you do make it, please do post it up here on this thread, I look forward to seeing what you build 
Can I build my website in Dreamweaver, that I can do easily. Or do I have to build it from scratch using PSP?
You can build it in whatever you like, as long as whatever you use outputs html. Dreamweaver makes HTML so yes, that’s OK for the look and feel.
My understanding though is that you want to make dynamic pages where your uploaded images are automatically added to the site. If you want that, you are going to need to do some scripting, or pay someone else to do it for you
Android is a platform. So that would be an app. Not a website.
Would you be able to use instagram to do this?