In my Bloggar API and Titles post earlier today, Russ and I were discussing where to put a user's password (in an e-mail) when moblogging. After thinking about it for a couple of hours tonight, it suddenly came to me. The best place for the password is in the "to" field. Meaning that you give your blog's e-mail address a nickname, or type in with your password prefixed to the address, followed by a space. Basically, the "to" field will look like this: 'mypassword' [email protected]. Then you can use InternetAddress.getPersonal() to get the prefix ('mypassword'), strip off the single quotes, and use that as the password! I tried it and it works like a charm. This way, you can create a contact with your password as the name and easily blog from your mobile phone or other e-mail client.
I also added support to Roller's Blogger API implementation so if your post contains <title>, then that is used for the title. Then I made the E-Mail and IM Processors of moblogger support passing subjects as titles.
If you have Windows XP and Windows Media Player 9, you might want to check this out.
Blogging Plug-in for Windows Media Player 9 Series
Add more personality to your blog with this plug-in that adds the artist, song, and album name to the Windows Media Player 9 Series title bar. Blogging clients like LiveJournal, w.bloggar, Semagic, and others can then easily add that information to your next entry while you compose.
It sounds cool at least. If you've tried it, please post your review as a comment!
Is there any compelling reason that moblogger should support the MetaWeblog API in addition to the Blogger API? I like Blogger because it's already in moblogger and it looks pretty simple. Roller supports it, so why not?
The only problem I have with it is that it doesn't support titles. For Roller, here's a workaround I was thinking of. If the post has a <title> tag in it, use the contents of that tag as the title, or for mobile users, we'd also offer this alternative:
#t put your title here #
Where "#t" is the trigger that there's a title (short for phone bloggers) and "#" is an indicator signifying the title has ended. It's a very simple way IMO to add title support to Roller for Blogger clients.
One of the folks that contacted me about hosting is Jason Rimmer of Irth Networks. The sweet thing about Jason's company is that they host blogs (movable type, bojsom, and roller), websites, email, etc. for not-for-profit activities and organizations. Free hosting!? What the hell?! It's true:
The operators of RhumbaNet, being completely self-taught and wanting to
give something back to the community that enabled and supported their
education recognized the perfect opportunity to do so. Hence, the
commercial venture was shutdown and transformed into Irth Networks. [more...]
Of course this is a screaming deal - so why didn't I jump at it? For one, I feel that I should pay for hosting this site, as well as my family's site. And now that the new server seems to be humming along nicely, there's no reason to find a new provider (probably just jinxed myself there). However, I might ask Jason to host a few of the demos I have running. We'll see how this server holds up for the next few days.
I did some tinkering with Moblogger and Jabber this evening, and I'm stoked to report that I successfully posted to Roller! I grabbed some code from blojsim and had it running fairly quickly. The biggest problem I ran into? Finding a Jabber client that would actually post a message (rather than a chat). The Jabber clients I have on my machine don't seem to post messages, so finally I downloaded skabber and everything worked right away! Too bad I spent the last hour trying to figure out what I was doing wrong (nothing). This could present a major problem for users. Most will probably be like me and assume they can use any Jabber client, when in reality, it has to be one that can send messages. For all I know, they all do, and I was just too tired to figure it out.
There's a heckuva lot more work to do, but the proof of concept is complete. One thing is that Moblogger uses the Blogger API - which doesn't seem to support titles. Bummer - we can probably fake it though (add bold, and a couple of <br />'s). I suppose I should apply for that project space now from SourceForge and get the code checked in.
