System Status Blog

I have started a project that is an add-on to b2evolution and eventually other blogging software. It will allow processing of plain text and HTML e-mails sent to a special e-mail address and will post them to any software using the Blogger API.

The web page for the project is http://www.lowbatteries.com/b2emo .

First of all, the name b2emo means nothing, and will change soon.

The basis for this script is Dr. Dave's "WP-keitai-mail Plugin".

I, like Dr. Dave, used Richard Heyes' Mime Decoding class.

I added in parsing of HTML-email using Jan's HTML2XML Parser.

I also took out the hard-coded user prefs, and made it so that username, password, and category were defined in the e-mail like so:

username::joe
password::secretword
category::36

This allows people to post to different blogs, etc, by just pasting different info at the top of their e-mail.

I made attachment handling object-oriented, with mime-types defined as objects. Adding more mime-types with thumbnail support should be very easy. Being able to upload a .pdf and having a .jpg preview would be
awesome, and I hope to implement that soon.

Any inline image in an HTML e-mail will be uploaded like an attachment and will be referenced in the original HTML when it is posted.
Any attached image not referenced in the HTML will be thumbnailed and appended to the end of the post.

Document and error logging/checking is almost completely non-existent in this first script.

I've only tested this using the HTML e-mail generated by Mozilla Thunderbird.
Currently only JPEG pictures are supported, and FTP has not been added.

I want to also add in support for other blog software besides b2evolution.

Any ideas/suggestions or code contributions are welcome.

Finally! After being very disappointed in the "live bookmarks" feature in the preview release of Mozilla Firefox browser, which didn't have any way for you to actually add rss feeds easily to your bookmarks, I have now found at the latest version of Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client does:

RSS Integration

Thunderbird now features a built in RSS reader which allows you to easily subscribe to and read news and weblogs that support RSS. from Thunderbird 0.8 Release Notes

Since browsing and subscribing to RSS feeds seems to have a lot more in common with e-mail than bookmarks, I see this a huge step forward in bringing RSS to the general public.

So far, the RSS reader I currently use is Feedreader, which is very simple and lightweight, but the less programs I can have running on my computer the better.

I think, after just 3 minutes, I may have switched though: Thunderbird offers a few great features for RSS lacking in Feedreader ... the delete key, for one. Having the ability to mark a message "read" (as in feedreader) isn't the same as deleting it - get rid of that clutter! Also, you can customize whether you see the feed's description of an article or automatically load the web page ... too cool.

I've modified Dr. Dave's "WP-keitai-mail Plugin" to work with b2evo (originally it is made for WordPress blog system ).
It was simple - just had to change the format that the XML data was sent in.

The result, I have e-mail-to-blog functionality, but I have to manually set it up for each individual user, and can use it only to post to one category.

So, I've started to write my own object-oriented script. My goals: make the script be able to post to b2evo, blogger, and WP, have the username, password, and category all given in the e-mail message body, parse HTML e-mail to postable XHTML, and allow uploading of almost any attachment (short of unsafe, executable data types; and limited by a set file size).

Using object-oriented addins to the code, you should be able to set up how to handle all sorts of different mime-content types, with thumbnail (or icon) generation.

This project will take very little coding on my part, mostly planning, as all of the pieces I can find elsewhere.

Right now, I'm owing A LOT to Dr. Dave, and am also planning on using a PHP script called HTML2XML.

Hope to have this script thrown together pretty soon :-)

I just discovered that the b2evo bookmarklet does much more than I thought!
Once I got looking at the source code, I realized that it puts the URL and title of the page you are currently looking at into the form automatically, as well as any text you may have selected into the message body.

I modified it slightly to put <blockquote%gt;</blockquote%gt; tags around selected text, but other than that I can't think of a way to improve it. Great job, b2evo devs!

I just saw a wonderful idea that has been implemented in MovableType. The bookmarklet I currently have with b2evo pops up a window where i can make a post really easy.

It would be awesome if the bookmarklet also searched the current page for a trackback URL and added that to the form, so if I decide to post about a specific entry on another weblog, the trackback will be easy!