ajani’s blog

All the cool kids know by now, since there was a blog entry on it, however, I just got to that point in my feed reader, so I'm all excited like it isn't 2 days old. =]

The gist of it is that they've made TwitterFeed obsolete for Posterous blogs, and also made images uploaded with posts autopost to Flickr. The second is the most awesome of the two, because it means I don't have to write a script to do it myself. Now I'm just waiting for them to do an autopost to LiveJournal, so that I don't need my script anymore.

Oh, yeah, and tags on posts would be totally awesome. (That's gotta be my #1 wanted feature.) But at least my name is unique, so using the search box on the explore page with my search term prefixed with 'ajani' finds me old posts pretty fast. (Actually, it would be awesome if I could embed that search box in the sidebar of my blog. =)

It looks like my script has a bug, and as a result, I've been shipping multiple copies of my posts to LJ. Oops. Anyways, I believe I've fixed it, and this is the post that will tell.

Thanks to aepfelx for notifying me that the machines had gone insane.

• Tagging. It may be one of the web 2.0 buzzwords, but it's damn useful. (And I'd really like to be able to link to sets of tagged posts, like how Flickr or Blogger do it)
• Ability to have the post editor default to source mode. Most of the time, that's what I want when editing.
• Setting so that I can write posts using reStructuredText or Markdown or something similar. It would be a bit nicer than having to write my posts in HTML. (I wouldn't mind if the post editor had a mode for this as well. =)
• Ability to edit posts via email. (Perhaps the email reply from a post would include the post body in the email, and if you edited that and replied to it, then it would replace the post on the site)
• Did I mention tagging? ;)
• A button to send uploaded images to Snapfish for printing. (individual image, or all images in the post) Garry and Sachin, if you are interested in this, I can get you in touch with the right folks at Snapfish. The API is pretty straightforward.

I've cleaned it up a bit, so I figured I could share it with the world, in case anyone else is interested in such a product. (This is also a test to see what happens if I send a Ruby script and a YAML file to Posterous.

This is meant to be run from cron (or the scheduler of your choice) as often as you like. I currently run it every 5 minutes. If you're not  scraping from Posterous, you can leave the Posterous hack part off. While it in theory supports pulling from multiple feeds, it doesn't keep track of the last entry in each feed seperately, so it wouldn't work quire right in the current version. (I'll probably fix that in the near future and post again)

I think that's about all I have to say about that for now. Maybe if someone expresses interest in using it, I'll write a proper README. =]

Update: So the attachment thing was an epic fail. It just dumped the entire thing into the post. I will put the files up here.

I have successfully hacked together a script to ship my Posterous updates to my Live Journal. When I get time to clean up the script, and remove the hardcoded things (like my username and password ;), I'll post it for the world to see. But now, I really should go to sleep.

It looks like Posterous doesn't have a link to the rss feed in the HTML, so if you're looking for a feed, it's going to be hard to find it. Until it does get added, my feed is http://ajani.posterous.com/rss.xml, in case you wanted to subscribe.