Mo’ blogging, less problems

Brewer St. 10:30 pm.

Those pics up on top of my front page? They’re pictures from my 3G phone, implant sent
in an MMS to an email address which pipes them to this here
perl script wot I wrote which creates MT entries and thumbnails
and stuff.

(2nd update, more about 9/9/03: POP3 version from Ben, another code patch from Chris)

Notes about usage and development:

1. Firstly, have some idea how to configure a script and have incoming
   mail piped to it. (I’m assuming basic UNIXy knowledge here) You’ll
   also need a working MT install and, somewhere reachable, the MIME::Tools
   modules. Oh, and obviously this should all be
   done on the same machine. (i.e. the machine that publishes your blog
   should also be capable of receiving email) (UPDATE: If you have blog and email on separate machines, Ben Milleare’s POP3 version may be the thing for you)
2. Download the script and set the variables at the start. You’ll
   also need to make a directory for the unpacked MIME files to go into.
3. You may want to make a new MT category for pictures, which makes it
   much easier to do tricks like my picture bar. The code for it looks like this:

   
<MTEntries lastn="4" category="pic">
<$MTEntryExcerpt$>
</MTEntries>


   … since it’s the entry excerpt that holds the clickable thumbnail.
   Once you’ve made the category, put its ID number into the $CAT_ID constant
   at the top of the code. If you don’t want to use category-setting, set it to 0.
   (Oh, and you’ll want to edit your main MTEntries tag on
   the Main Index to use every category except the picture one.)

4. Unfortunately, there aren’t currently any logging or
   debugging facilities for the script beyond those that your MTA or
   perl environment provide. However, I found that testing by piping
   a pre-saved mail from a file was enormously helpful. (Well, more
   helpful than having to work my way through my phone’s abysmal
   message-sending interface and then sifting through the mail logs
   for errors every time, anyway)
5. Once you’re sure it works, set up your mail handling in procmail
   or whatever. Since I use qmail
   (for reasons beyond my control) I have a .qmail-... file
   that merely contains the line

   |/home/yoz/ym.pl

   There should probably be a preline in there, but it seems
   to work fine without it.

6. I say above that it’s built for handling MMS (Multimedia Message
   Service) mails from phones and the like, but it’ll handle any mail with
   an image attachment. (As long as there’s only one image. I should probably
   fix that.) If there’s some
   text in the body (not the subject) it’ll handle that too, using
   it as a title for the entry, the A tag and the value of the ALT attribute.
7. Thanks to Chris Carline, the subject line can be used to rotate the image if your phone can’t do that for you.
   Send “t” to rotate 90 degrees anti-clockwise or “tc” for 90 degrees clockwise.
8. Yes, okay, it’s a badly-hacked-up piece of shite, but it appears
   to work. I didn’t use XML-RPC or any of that nonsense because firstly
   it seemed a terribly roundabout way of getting some perl to call some
   other perl and secondly because I wanted it to do some thumbnailing
   and stuff. And okay, when I had this script half-written
   Cory showed
   me a Python one that was already done but I was too far into this one
   to care, and besides, that one didn’t do thumbnailing. Credit must
   go to Olivier
   Mueller’s script for inspiration
   and also to Azeem for
   irritating me into thinking about this in the first place.
9. Thus, there is no license and no guarantee. Caveat haxxor. If it
   breaks in half, you own both pieces. Please don’t use it to kill
   people, though mortal embarrassment is fine (and, frankly, inevitable).