In my quest to find a good way to post photos to my blog without linking from a third party service (like Flickr), I managed to spam myself… 99 times over the last two days! Ideally, I’d like to be able to email posts and photos to my blog via my phone. Here’s what I’ve tried:
- WordPress has a built in script for emailing posts to a private email address. It is supposed to display inline attachments but doesn’t. It doesn’t even seem to work for posting blogs without photos. Strike one.
- I have Sprint picture mail. I found a plugin that’s supposed to do a screen scrape of the image posted at Sprint, upload it to my WordPress uploads folder on my server space, and post it to my blog. It achieves part of what I want, except that you can’t write an accompanying blog post when you send the pic. Also, the plugin author recommends accompanying this plugin with a cron plugin so that the process is automated, say every 15 minutes. The problem with this is that if the script craps, or more likely, Sprint makes a change to its service, then the cron script posts garbage to your blog non-stop until you delete the original email. This is what happened yesterday. So, strike two.
- Flickr isn’t bad but there’s two things I don’t like: One is that the image is hosted by a third party and the other is that the accompanying blog post is also posted at Flickr. I don’t pay for Flickr so I don’t really want to rely on it. I’d rather have my images on my own server space. I don’t really want to use Flickr as a blog, so I don’t want what I write (especially if it’s lengthy) to also be posted on Flickr. If I used Flickr, I’d have to use a separate method for posting text blogs via email.
So far, I haven’t found a solution – aside from Flickr – that actually works. If you know of something I can try, please let me know!
No answers yet? Damn. I was hoping to find out about this as well.
The problem with this is that if the script craps, or more likely, Sprint makes a change to its service, then the cron script posts garbage to your blog non-stop until you delete the original email. This is what happened yesterday.
Sorry about that…. I’m the author of that script, and I’ve got to say, I’m not happy with it, and I don’t see a way to make it ever really work. Most users seem to run into a problem where the call to Sprint times out and the post turns into a massive screen full of garbage. I don’t have a good solution.
Until one presents itself, I use flickr too, and I’m not delighted with it. The main problem I have with it is that every post is titled “You Have Picture Mail!”
Thanks, Dan.
What I really meant by garbage is that every post is titled “You Have Picture Mail!” and the body of the post is blank. So it’s not actually a screen full of gobbledygook. The ‘garbage’ production is due to the fact that the process never completes so the cron script causes it to be re-executed – with the same blank post published – until it’s stopped manually.
What was weird is that the last time I posted an image via Sprint the plugin DID work. I haven’t made any changes to the blog, its functions or any of the plugins, but this time it didn’t work.
That postie post isn’t showing up as a direct link. I get a 404 error. Can’t comment on that post either, as I get the same 404 error.
What the hey is “Postie”?
Postie is an older WordPress plugin available from http://postie.economysizegeek.com/. It does all kinds of cool stuff… but not for me. Since I don’t have time to mess around with it, I guess I’m just not going to find what I’m looking for right now. Bleh.
What was weird is that the last time I posted an image via Sprint the plugin DID work. I haven’t made any changes to the blog, its functions or any of the plugins, but this time it didn’t work.
Exactly. It all depends on how long Sprint is taking to fulfill our request for the image off their server. Sometimes it works brilliantly, and other times it’s a total disaster. And there’s just nothing to be done about it from the plugin side.
I just wanted to say that i completely share your pain – i rely hate to rely on external sites for services or hosting (which is why i’m on wordpress to begin with), so i’d really rather not use Flickr for what *should* be a simple task, if Sprint weren’t so damn difficult. I hope you keep us updated if you find any good solutions!
(When i tried to use the DanRay plugin tonight it actually posted my entire picturemail – not just the photo.)