Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: WebLog update through E-mail?

Author:Dan Lyke
Posted:11/10/1999; 4:01:55 PM
Topic:WebLog update through E-mail?
Msg #:12969 (In response to 12965)
Prev/Next:12968 / 12970

Someone else who believes that E-mail is the ultimate interface! (at least for updating certain sorts of databases)

I maintain my blog via e-mail, I use a tool called newwwsboy which I wrote in Perl. I'm a big believer in "no new user interfaces", so it tries to take the exact same "check out this link" sort of messages that I had been sending to friends and turn them into HTML.

Thus far I've depended upon security through obscurity, if someone malicious wanted to look through mail logs (or even the sent mail folders) on any system I update it from I'd be hosed, although in almost two years that hasn't happened (I have given some of the magic addresses to a number of friends). And to do this otherwise a cracker would have to search Flutterby.com's e-mail name space by trial and error, something I think I'd notice.

I try to do as little of my leisure computing on Windows as possible, but a little time with Frontier and Pegasus (or whatever else, I just know I could do it in Pegasus) and you should be able to do something similar. RFC-822 compliant (or even close) messages are easy to get the text out of.

If RSS is your end goal and you're a Un*x weenie, I've also got a really gross Perl script to make RSS files from HTML, which I keep promising to rewrite the correct way and generate Scripting News and Whump XML (and whatever other formats I can get my hands on). But, of course, if you're going with Frontier it's probably got a much cleaner method of generating this stuff.

And on databases which do e-mail responses to search queries, I played with that stuff way back in the FidoNet era, nowadays it'd be minutes worth of work to write a hack to take a query, munge it into SQL, dump it to a database, and generate a reply with the database response.

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