1 min read

Moblogging with MT, pop2blog and my phone

Using a mixture of duct tape, pipe cleaners, and old tupperware bowls, I've now got my phone talking to my blog.

Starting with pop2blog, I hacked it to only keep track of attached images and email subjects, ignoring the rest of the message. It also only transmits image names as new posts to Movable Type on this server. It's on another server though, since some of the perl modules required weren't available to my activestate perl install's package manager (thanks chris for figuring out a workaround). I'm doing more CSS tricks to display a short 100px tall peek at the images, and if you click through you'll see the full image (still working on the archive pages for images).

So to recap, I take a photo with my phone, push about 7 buttons to send it off to a secret email account on one server. A cronjob on a different server checks the account every 10 minutes, then processes the messages and sends the results to a third server via xml-prc, which updates a movable type blog (including one custom template to produce the table you see above, and another template to create the CSS on the fly), which is included in another movable type blog (the one you are reading). Three servers, two blogs (with custom templates), a phone, and bunch of rudimentary glue code. Now you can see why I'm surprised it worked at all.

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