Use Android Phone to build your website?

**mmedearis** · 09-27-2011 04:02 PM

Google MPM Emporium and take a look. It is a site I developed where the website is generated from your phone.
About 6 years ago I built a website for my inventory so I could have a web presence to avoid paying eBay and Amazon fees all the time for my stuff. The part that annoyed me the most was having to manually manage the pictures I took with my camera, getting them loaded into the website etc. Second was scanning UPC codes. I hate typing those in and it is error prone.
So with the release of Android, I thought hey. This is a unix operating system with a nice developer API, you can use the camera and also use the camera to scan barcodes with zxing APi, why not do all the work on the phone so you can enter stuff while you are out in the warehouse and then have the phone build your website for you and export upload feeds to the sdcard? Make sense? Well even if it doesn't I built the silly thing anyway. Handheld Lister is the name of the Android software out in the Marketplace if you have an Android phone. It is in the 1.x phase, but 1.12 at the time of this writing and I am working on it all the time so it is getting pretty solid already. mpm emporium is the "type" of website it will build for you. It also will batch upload to Amazon, it uses google docs spreadsheet for inventory control. Has their shopping cart etc. Not super easy to set up but once you get used to it it can really save you time. This is my second go at this type of software so I have been thinking about it for years. I am proud of it so give it a go and let me know what you think. The best thing about it is NO FEES WHATSOEVER! Seriously, Google doesn't charge anything, I don't charge anything so it is truly a 100% eCommerce website for free. Of course you can always donate if you like it.

Enjoy!
Michael

**danielcassady** · 10-10-2011 03:32 PM

great concept but isn't this tedious uploading info on a phone?

**mmedearis** · 10-10-2011 05:20 PM

You would think that but look at it this way. When taking pictures of your inventory you generally do some sort of upload. In addition, you generally rename all the pictures to something your website can use. With Handheld Lister, you never have to do this step. You upload everything and you are done. No renaming pictures, thus eliminating a time consuming step when building your website. Also, it handles the Google product feed upload and the site map generation so it can save you a ton of time. You know it is kind of funny and I am sure you have heard someone say that computers seem to be getting slower and their phone is getting faster so they are just going to use their phone all the time when their computer is acting up for some reason. It always gets a giggle from the crowd but it really isn't that far off I don't think. I am just amazed at what these Android devices can do, I have older computers that it just puts to shame. Funny.
Anyway, thanks for the good question and your interest. Give it a try and tell me what you think!
Michael