Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Blogging via text message

The problem with blogging via text message is that Verizon always puts "This message sent using yada yada" at the end. To see how I resolved this problem, check out the HTML source of this post...

This message was sent using the Picture and Video Messaging service from Verizon Wireless!

To learn how you can snap pictures and capture videos with your wireless phone visit www.verizonwireless.com/picture.

Note: To play video messages sent to email, QuickTime� 6.5 or higher is required.

10 comments:

  1. At first I didn't think it had worked, and then I realized I had to enable blogger.com and blogspot.com through NoScript...

    Very clever. Doesn't work on Thunderbird though. Maybe there's some way to SMS your posts to another machine for preprocessing, and have it posted from there?

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  2. Hmmm, yeah, that would be even better, wouldn't it?

    This would not be the first time that I needed an external server to do something I wanted to do with my blog. Perhaps I should beg Ryan for an account on his server...

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  3. I forget how I got around that... I think it's because all of my mobile posts are picture posts, which go through Flickr, which has magic to strip that. Never tried doing a post via e-mail; maybe I should sometime...

    My blog software (b2evolution) is pretty good and fairly comprehensive. However, I've still got a couple crazy-ass hacks in use... my favorite is a proxy to go between Flickr's blog triggerer (which uses php's curl library, which *insists* on setting Expect: 100-continue) and lighttpd (which follows the letter of the RFC and rejects such requests as it doesn't support it). That was a fun lunchtime project.

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  4. Doesn't work for people viewing your RSS feed. No javascript there.

    I read this in Google Reader and was highly amused.

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  5. Ah, damn you RSS! So yeah, looks like Anonymous (who I am pretty sure is my friend Matt) has the best suggestion: I instead send my text to a mail address that I set up on a server somewhere, and the server processes the text and forwards it to blogger.

    I suppose the advantage of that is once I have it set up, I could even get fancy and put together a way to compose more complex posts, e.g. I could put in "tags" that the processing/forwarding software could recognize as "Wait, I've got more content to append to this", "Float the accompanying image left/right", "Size the accompany image", "Add the following caption to the image", etc. Each of those things would be like a 5-minute job in Perl...

    I've been trying to talk my wife into letting me put Linux on our home machine, but she pointed out some software we use that you still can't use on Linux, so I guess that is out. Uh, Ryan? heh...

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  6. I suppose this means I have to set up an RSS reader and test my blog, too... mumble mumble. Web design sucks! :D

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  7. It wasn't your friend Matt, I can assure you. I mainly post anonymously here because I didn't want to decide between a new pseudonym or old, whether to choose a unique password, assign that nym to an existing password tier of mine, or something else entirely. Also it's fewer fields to fill out.

    And posting anon keeps me from building a reputation.

    I suppose I could sign my anonymous posts with my public key and an email address. That might simplify things. If I spend more time on blogspot I may actually make a profile or start posting through an OpenID account.

    Regardless, I'm glad my idea was helpful.

    As for running Windows programs on Linux, there's WINE, though I imagine you've already checked WineHQ for the apps in question and found it wanting in compatibility. As for mac... I dunno... there's always virtualization...

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  8. My apologies, Anonymous! It turns out you made your comment about 10 minutes after I had posted a comment on Matt's blog about this post, so I just assumed you were him. Guess that shows what happens when I assume stuff..

    I've thought about WINE... Most likely the apps in question would be fine (iTunes, Photoshop - my wife hates Gimp, go figure). I dunno, it does make me nervous though.

    The other reason my wife doesn't want to install Linux is summed up in this conversation:

    Mariah: "Plus that, I really don't want to have to re-learn Unix."

    Me: "You wouldn't have to. Just do everything in the GUI, you most likely never have to use the command prompt if you don't want to."

    Mariah: "Jay, please. If we have Linux, I will eventually be temped to mess around with the command prompt."

    Me: "But I thought you just said you didn't want to...?"

    Mariah: "I don't want to re-learn it, but if it's around, I will end up doing it anyway."

    Heh, d'oh...

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  9. My girlfriend also denigrates the GIMP, mainly because on her mac it crashes when you try to do literally anything with it. Basically on her 13" macbook it's an overblown image viewer. She's uninterested in going further with it, so I haven't investigated the problem — and sadly now she's not interested in Inkscape either.

    She's going to be taking a photography class soon which requires a DSLR camera and Photoshop. Maybe I can try to lure her back to FOSS (depending on the GIMP's capabilities).

    I don't know your wife's proclivities, but I've found myself doing very little CLI work when I use window managers like GNOME (also Xfce to a lesser extent). On fluxbox, however, I morph into the compleat console jockey. Maybe the right interface is all she needs?

    Again, maybe VMWare or some other virtualization layer is the way to go.

    Good luck with Mariah.

    On an unrelated note, the captchas here are near always phonetic. I'm tempted to use them as a random name generator for my tabletop roleplaying, suddenly.

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  10. Mariah's issues with GIMP are purely interface-related, and some of them are even just a result of her being "used to" Photoshop... but unfortunately, a number of common things she does in Photoshop require an extra keystroke or two in GIMP, which discourages her from trying to learn the interface.

    Some folks at work use VMWare, and all I can say is it makes me scared. They have had stability issues that I haven't had with my XP machine. They aren't common, but any is too many..

    Regarding Mariah's command-line "proclivities", the problem is that she has had a number of Unix tech support and other Unix-related jobs, just because it was a lucrative skill she picked up in her late teens and she was good at it -- but she absolutely hated it, can't stand working in an office.

    So she remembers enough Unix to occasionally be like, "Hmmm, this would be quicker if I just did it from the command prompt," but then actually re-learning Unix brings back bad memories I guess.

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