Samantha Ling

:start

This is an update about what I've done to samanthaling.com. Nothing all that interesting on the front end, but in the back end, I added a few functionalities for myself.

The first is that I've added a plugin called Wordpress PDA, which reroutes browsers if it detects that you are using a mobile browser such as Blazer. If you use a mobile browser and it doesn't work for you, let me know. The template used for that is very basic and it uses a lot of links I don't use for the regular template. But it allows you to read the posts as well as comment should you feel the need. And that's what I ultimately wanted.

It was an easy install. Unzip, upload, activate. That was pretty much it.
I just wish that Livejournal had a mobile version. Reading my friends list is cumbersome, and don't even talk to me about posting comments on there.

The second is that I added the Postie plugin. It's a wordpress plugin that will allow me to update via email. This way, when I'm writing from my pda phone, I don't have to try to copy and paste to another browser window. I write one email and send it off. The only clunkiness about it is that Postie requires you put the category in the subject line, which means that it'll show up in LJ. And in order for me to use lj tags, I have to the use the :start and :end lines, which will show up in LJ as well. But at least I can get tags and you guys don't really care though right? I mean, you'll know when the entry starts and stops. You won't be worried that it got cut off somehow, right? Right?

I'm using Godaddy.com and they allow cron jobs, which you can get to via the control panel. This was a little more complicated since I tried using my Gmail account. Though it's supposed to work with Gmail as other people have done so before, it looks like the later Wordpress versions (2.2 at least) doesn't work with it. When I switched to another email account, it could access the email server, but it was still not working right. If you don't have the photo and file upload directories set correctly, they won't work right. I had to put those folders in the root file rather than the plugins file. But once I did that, the everything seemed to work.

So this is my first post testing this post by email for both LJ and WP.

Hopefully it'll all work out!

:end

Here's an update:

The cron job doesn't quite work, but if you go to /plugins/postie/get_mail.php in your web browser, it'll grab the entry for you. I am too tired of troubleshooting to be bothered with it right now.

LJ won't grab the entry if you have anything in the cc: or bcc: areas. You also can't put the lj email address in those fields either. You have to put all your email addresses in the to: field, which pretty much conks out any email notifies if you want to keep your livejournal password secret.