This Mexican programmer Jonathan Hernandez is brilliant. He hacked gMail, Google’s eMail service, into a blog.

So, say you have an email address, website@gmail.com. You can go in and check your email as usual (except gMail is a little cooler than usual). If you want to post something to the public net you simply Star it, as per the image here.

I’ve long that that the holy grail of webdesign was eMail posting. Email is an application that everyone knows how to use, whereas webpages confuse the shit out of people. However, the protocols are similar enough that blogs like WordPress, Typepad, and Movable Type can implement eMail posting – though setting them up is a pain.

I haven’t tested the demo yet, so I am of course talking about what I want this to be, but it’s what I’ve been looking for for a year. A website that normal people can use as easily as checking their email.

OK, I tested it. From scratch to first post took about 5 minutes.

1. Download the 23 kb program file from Gallina

2. Open the file genGallina.php with a text editor, Wordpad for example

3. Change the following values.

$blogTitle = “My Mailblog”;
$user = “myemailaddress@gmail.com”;
$password = “mypassword”;

4. Then I uploaded all the files to my Server. I put them in a folder called ‘mailblog’. This requires using ftp (WSftp for me) and having a server, which is prohibitive I guess. It would be easy for someone to host this service for new people. It doesn’t really affect server load, because all the information is stored on Google. The XML just pulls data out of their database.

5. Then log to to http://yoursite.com/mailblog/genGallina.php. This generates the blog. I don’t know how but I don’t need to.

6. Then the blog appeared at http://indi.ca/mailblog/gallina/index.xml. Looks like I’ve got a piece of Spam there now, whatever.

Now I don’t have to mess with it, unless I want to edit the CSS or XSL file to change the look and feel. If I was doing this for a client I would just tell them to use that eMail account and Star the entries they want to publish. My only beef is that it doesn’t post attachments, but hopefully someone will hack that in. I dunno, that might mess up the elegance of the hack. Note: it supports JPG and PNG image attachments now.

Posted on Thursday, September 9th, 2004 in Computers, Future, Tech.