Three main technological discoveries from moblogging on a trip to Akita this weekend are that (1) somehow everything was going up in the wrong category, meaning that my supposedly photos-only "photowall" blew up all over the place, (2) the version of Internet Explorer in Windows CE will not let me do anything more than log in and look at MT entries, and (3) FOMA phones don't work in the mountains.
Regarding (1) I now know what I need to do to make it possible to post photos with text comments that appear on the index page, then have just the images appear in a "photowall" without having to push the text into the extended entry; use the MTPhotoGallery, MTEmbedImage and MTGrid plugins.
The embed image plugin is to kill two birds with one stone; so far I have been taking 352 x 288 CIF images and cutting them down to 176 x 144 QCIFs in the phone to upload, mainly because I didn't have a way to control the size they showed up as on the web and didn't want a huge image in every post.
Using the photo gallery and grid plugins, I should be able to achieve the "photowall" I intended and keep everything automated.
As for the Windows CE problem, haven't nailed it yet.
There is already one tutorial linked to at Mfop2 that documents a way to make a sidebar that displays moblog pictures in your main blog using PHP. I've found another way that is conceptually very similar, but uses a Movable Type plugin instead and may even be a bit simpler. I will assume that you've read the tutorial linked to above and keep my explanation to the bare bones.
What you need to do is:
1. Create a new blog (the moblog) in the same installation of MovableType as your main blog.
2. Create an Mfop2 account.
3. Download the MTOtherBlog plugin from David Raynes' site and install it in your MovableType plugins directory.
4. Insert the MTOtherBlog code wherever you feel like on your page. The moblog sidebar at gme.jp, for example, uses the following (with a few decorations that I have stripped out here):
<MTOtherBlog blog_id="5">
<a href="http://mo.gme.jp"><$MTBlogName$></a><br />
<MTEntries lastn="1">
<$MTEntryBody$>
</MTEntries>
</MTOtherBlog>
Literally all that you should need to do is set the other blog's ID and the number of entries you would like displayed; you can adjust what bits of the moblog entry (body, excerpts, date posted, author, etc.) display as you would for any other set of MT entries.
One thing to note is that even if you have posted a new entry to your moblog, the moblog image displayed in the sidebar in your main blog will not update until you rebuild the main blog.