So supposedly WordPress includes the option to receive posts by email. At least I found the options as I was thumbing through the Adminstration screen yesterday.
Okay, the documentation is here, which points out (more importantly) how to tell WP to actually go out and check the mail. Doing it manually is kind of goofy. Putting some code in the footer of each page to trigger it to do so is clever, but messy. I can certainly do a cron job, though, similar to stuff I used to do with MT.
Alright, try the manual trigger, just to see if it worked. Hmmmm.
- Comes across as a “pending” post.
- Comes across from the “admin” account.
- Comes across with cruft if it’s not a plaintext message.
- No attachments. No HTML.
Hrm. #3-4 I can work around. #2 is annoying. #1 … well, wtf?
Ah, I see now. It validates against email address sent. I have the same addy for both me and for Admin, but I’ve now changed that to my Gmail account, which is where mail will come from if I send it from Gmail. And (see previous post) it works, huzzah.
There may be some other niceties that can be done with this, but for the moment I’m just jazzed I can send a full-blown text message to my blog (and one larger than a Tweet), wherever I have email access.
Bugger. I was really hoping you’d explore the various ways that Twitter posts could be bounced up to WP as a new post, and this makes me suspect you’ll be much less worried about doing that.
Which is fine: the email posting is nice, but I actually use Twitter for… you know… Twitter — being able to update the blog at the same time is a bonus I’m loathe to give up.
It’s on my list … though not high on my list. I have seen some references to Twitter widgets, though, so certainly someone else has skinned this.
What is it you’re hoping to accomplish? If it always includes an image, I would do it via Flickr, with additional verbiage added. My hubby warns against email-to-post because if someone gets your password, your blog’s at their mercy.
The email to post in WP requires knowledge of the account configured for it. That’s not only highly obscured, but easily changed (and, at worst, it allows posting, not anything else). So I’m not *too* worried.
At the moment, though, I can’t get the cron job to invoke the module to check the mail queue. On my list.
I messed around with posting via email under both MovableType and ExpressionEngine and it works reasonably well in both of those platforms, but I hate doing it that way.