Version 0.9.4 of AutoBlogger is now available.
This is another quick bugfix release, but includes a patch sent to me by Chris Lewis, who patched it to support sending “>date” attributes from the iPhone mail client. Apparently the iPhone insists on adding whitespace before any line starting with “>”, assuming that it’s an indented reply.
In other news, I’ve moved the main repository to github, as I’m 100% addicted to git.
AutoBlogger Site: http://www.inarow.net/entries/projects/one_evening/autoblogger/
Grab it: Download Tarball or Git Clone (git clone git://github.com/cdmoyer/autoblogger.git)
Version 0.9.2 of AutoBlogger is now available.
This is the tiniest of bug fix releases. Now, whenever new photos are processed, all pages are rebuilt. This keeps the archive pages from becoming stale.
AutoBlogger Site: http://www.inarow.net/entries/projects/one_evening/autoblogger/
Grab it: Download Tarball or Anonymous SVN (svn co svn://inarow.net/trunk/autoblogger)
Version 0.9.1 of AutoBlogger is now available.
This includes two changes, one bug fix and one new feature:
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AutoBlogger Site: http://www.inarow.net/entries/projects/one_evening/autoblogger/
Grab it: Download Tarball or Anonymous SVN (svn co svn://inarow.net/trunk/autoblogger)
Version 0.9 of AutoBlogger is now available.
This is mainly some cleanup and addition of licensing info (“oh boy!”).
It does include one new feature which I’ve found quite useful. the ability to pass a date in the body of an email, and use that as the publish date. (I plan to use this for importing my old blogspot blog.)
AutoBlogger Intro: http://www.inarow.net/entries/projects/one_evening/autoblogger/autoblogger.html
Grab it: Download Tarball or Anonymous SVN (svn co svn://inarow.net/trunk/autoblogger)
Goal: Live up to my photoblog’s name, Proudestfather, by updating it with adorable pictures on a regular basis.
Plan: Whip up a quick perl script which will take emails from an email account, parse, create thumbnails, and generate static HTML.
Results: Download Tarball — Anonymous SVN (svn co svn://inarow.net/trunk/autoblogger) — Proudest Father
With this in mind, I decided to implement this project in perl, for several reasons:
With this in mind, I set out to complete this project in an evening…
5:30 Start 5:35 README and templates/index.tpl created 6:00 AutoBlogger::Post.pm created This involved learning some basics about perl objects. Experimented with Class::Std and h2xs to make a Module Went with a very simple class6:10 Made autoblogger.pl and it takes arguments Found GetOpt::Long and applied it Verifies that pop credentials are passed Verifies that you give it a publish and storage directory that exist6:15 Mail::POP3Client chosen and installed Net::Pop3 doesn't seem to do SSLCoffee7:10 Pop Harness in place, need SSL Done putzing with IO::Socket::SSL, took a while to make CPAN install it properly Throw in a debug_tell() sub that takes a message and optional importanceDinner8:15 Start framework for parsing mails Add --rebuild and --nopop to support testing Man, getopts makes that easy8:50 Ok, now I have lots of command line args, write a usage() Currently, the script: logs in to pop downloads emails parses them out to find date, text and imageTime to refactor. Goals: Raw MIME message archived Ability to just rebuild index, a single month, or all Don't recreate images when rebuilding, unless size changes Plan: Break storage/ into months (storage/200712/) Put messages in their own folder storage/YYYYmm/dd_hhmmss/ raw.txt MIME::Parser files9:50 Ok, that's rewritten and tested. Onto writing out an index.10:40 Rewrote it so that the AutoBlogger::Post class takes the storage directory for the email in the constructor, and builds the object around this. Now to have it ensure that the thumbnails are there.Snack time. Hmm, pretzels. Housework, exciting!12:15 Start and finish thumbnailing, make the size optional. This goes quickly with GD. File::Copy::Recursive is needed to move the MIME::Parser files into their target storage directory (mainly because I happen to have /home and my docroot on different partitions)12:40 Tweaks, debuging... w00t! index.html is there.Ok, time for some Kingdom of Loathing turns. (http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/, give it a try)1:30 Back1:40 Refactor out the index into a do_file 2:00 Apply that to the archives 2:50 Test, tweak template, site up with 2 downloaded posts, index and archive!
At this point, the project is working and ready for a beta release! Quite an evening, but good results. I’m sure I’ll push out updates. I want to support passing in a date in the body of the message, for importing older posts. I did take the time to create some usage details.
autoblogger.pl [args] path-to-storage path-to-published-site
-v [--verbose] Verbose mode
-h [--host=]* Pop Host
-u [--user=]* Pop User
-p [--pass=]* Pop Password
-s [--ssl] Use SSL
-n [--nopop] Don't get newmessages
-r [--rebuild=] Rebuild output index,200708 or index or 200708 or all
-i [--indexsize=] How many posts on the index
-e [--extension=] Extension for output html (default html)
[--tmp=] tmp directory (defaults to /tmp
[--thumbsize=] thumbnail size (defaults to 150x150)
[--fullsize=] full image size (defaults to 800x800)
* required
Often, I’ll sit down to solve a fairly simple problem, and whip out a software solution. These projects are varied and sundry:
Normally, these projects get completed, put into service and forgotten. Occasionally, I get ambitious and throw them into version control, to save myself later pain.
One Evening Projects will be a regular feature here, where I take some extra time to document, describe and package these projects. Who knows, maybe somebody else will actually benefit. Most of the time these projects are also learning experiences, and I’ll share some of that education as well.
You can browse these projects here
