phil ringnalda

Haha.
I was thinking the same thing Phil. Yipee!

hey, I was doing that with bbt a while back and I never released it. It was flakey as hell.

so maybe it means soon and maybe it means never :)

heh.

So are you saying that just because something is flakey as hell, it shouldn’t be released? Hmm. That’s a different perspective.

Playing with email-to-blog in Radio, I did notice that the formatting was, shall we say, a bit difficult to control, but for people that really need it, it’s a killer feature. I talked to someone who jumped ship to one of those programs with diary in the url (I’ve honestly forgotten which one), because they did email-to-blog, and he was doing the Pacific Crest Trail this summer and wanted to be able to send email updates from some sort of handheld.

If it doesnt work 99 percent of the time then I dont implement it. I intended to rewrite it to account for some of what I learnt but never found the time. personally I think its a killer feature, I just dont know if its something that can be done effectively. Too many types of emails, html, text, mac formatted text. Blah blah. It was a nightmare.

I guess I’m admitting my stupidity here, but wouldn’t updating from a handheld be the only thing email-to-blog is really useful for? If you can email, you’ve got internet access, right? I just don’t see what’s so cool about it.

I suppose it’s a neat and shiny new toy, all the same…

Shiny new toy is the biggie, but off the top of my head:

Post all those forwarded a thousand times jokes without having to copy and paste (not for me, thanks).

Blog from your email-enabled cell phone (again, not for me, thanks).

If everyone in your office recognizes the Blogger interface from a mile off, posting by email is a little more subtle way to goof off.

Send a CC to your blog when you email someone (raises authentication issues: I think I’d do a secret subject that posts & publishes, and if it doesn’t have the secret subject, it goes into a pending file until you check and choose to publish it).

Oh. Boring. I guess if I did, had, or cared about any of those things, it might be neat.

On to new, and shinier, toys!

The main advantage as I see it is speed.

I can rattle off an email in 5 seconds that would take me 30 or more to go to the website and enter it then publish.

I played with it when I had it working on bbt and if you emailed a few posts you would see how amazingly simple it makes blogging. It simply doesnt get any easier.

The down side is formatting nightmares. Emails can be slow and sometimes not ever arrive. Its not really hard to spoof an email address, meaning easy way to post to blogs when youre not aloud to.

and so on.

still. its pretty cool.

I think a big advantage would be the ability to easily link your blog to other web services. Here’s an example (probably not the best one): you could sign up for a service that sends email reminders when your friends’ birthdays arrive. Instead of having it email you, you can just give it the email of your blog, so when the time comes around, you’ll automatically have a ”Happy birthday xxxx” message on your blog. That way, you won’t forget to post it :)

Hossein, that’s horrible.

I love it.

Actually email2blog is pretty cool…. The Mobilephone people in my city allow SMS2Email – so with everything in place, I can blog while I’m stuck in traffic, using SMS!

[I’m using my very own CMS that does all this]

and oh, phil – I forgot to tell ya – love your blog!!

[the blogsnob ad’s looking great] ;)

Along the same lines, it’s the extremely lazy coder’s answer to the API: rather than figure out how to add an XML-RPC library to post to your blog from a PHP script, you can just say mail($to, $subject, $message) and be done with it.

Sure, it’s slow, sloppy, and not guaranteed to work every single time, but that’s what makes it internety. It seems to me like people in general are getting unreasonable expectations about how reliable things on the internet will, can, and should be. There’s never been any guarantee that every packet will make it through, or every host will be up all the time, and while you should try to make sure your stuff is up, you should always assume that everything else will be much worse than it actually is. The worst part is, as you get close to 100% reliable, it gets vastly harder to improve, but people’s expectations get vastly higher. If you are usually down for 5 or 10 minutes a day, people will shrug it off, but if you are usually up for two weeks at a time, and then you go down for 5 minutes, they’ll scream bloody murder.

Arnab – thanks, I was just about to have to go Googling to remind me why I knew your name.

Hossein..

bad bad you. oh man. ;)

I can’t remember whether or not Userland’s Mail to the Future service adds a giveaway tagline, but if it doesn’t, that would be even better, using a competitor’s free service to pretend that you remembered to post something to your blog. Hmm. If Ev does it so that emailed posts publish automatically, then that would give you what people expected from ”post to the future”: an actual ”post & publish to the future”!

I want email to blog. Yes I do.

As Phil (I think) said: I can more easily update via email, as no one cares if Im writing an email, it looks like work – but opening up a web interface, or even the bbtwin raises eyebrows when I could be doing more productive things like.. um. well I dont know. but something productive. :)

It would be a lot easier for me to update while I’m traveling overseas. When you’re paying by the minute to check your e-mail in Internet cafes, it would be easier for me to discretely fire off something via e-mail. The problem I had on my last trip was that no one in my group understood why I wanted to blog, but I could get away with e-mailing long entries to my sister and having her post them on my blog.