Moblogging

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 8:12 am

A little nice blogsystem like Zomplog - Serendipity could learn a LOT from its nifty control panel interface! - can do, what Serendipity can't, namely making moblogging a breeze. You just have to set your email, check if it's your normal or a dedicated moblogging email - and voila, you can moblog via MMS from your mobile phone. No cronjobs or other trials - like having to click POPfetcher to get the entry to show up lol. Why can't Serendipity?
See my Zomplog blog here: http://blangstrup.info
Go the the Zomplog site: http://zomplog.zomp.nl/

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 1:48 pm

Hi!

The popfetcher plugin can in fact be combined with serendipitys cronjob plugin, which can also "fake" cronjobs without manual user interaction.

Best regards,
Garvin

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 3:28 pm

Yes, but my point was, that you can moblog Zomplog without cronjobs - much more userfriendly - and built-in. You should take a look.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:33 pm

Hi!

Yes, and my point was that you can moblog with s9y and popfetcher and the crontab plugin, wihtout any other manual interaction.

You set it up in a matter of 5 minutes and then need no interaction. Just send a mail and be done with.

You should have a look!

Best regards,
Garvin

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:37 pm

Oh, it's just because I have tried moblogging with Serendipity, Popfetcher and cronjobs with tweaks, and it was messy, too much for me.

Design: I really would like Serendipity to have as great designs for the control panel as it has for the frontend. The plugin site is nice with javascript and moving things, but it makes one loooooong column if you have many plugins, not nice. And one or two styles? Serendipity is in dire need for a simple, clean controlpanel interface design - so please download Zomplog and take a look at their control panel, its the best I have seen.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:40 pm

Hi!

davidcrickett wrote:Oh, it's just because I have tried moblogging with Serendipity, Popfetcher and cronjobs with tweaks, and it was messy, too much for me.

But did you try the cronjob PLUGIN of serendipity? Or did you set up MANUAL cronjobs? That's a completely different world.

Design: I really would like Serendipity to have as great designs for the control panel as it has for the frontend. The plugin site is nice with javascript and moving things, but it makes one loooooong column if you have many plugins, not nice. And one or two styles? Serendipity is in dire need for a simple, clean controlpanel interface design - so please download Zomplog and take a look at their control panel, its the best I have seen.

I fully agree that we need people supporting Serendipity to take a step on redesigning the admin panel and some interface components, yes, please.

Since I pretty enjoy the admin panel (because I designed most parts of it) I am oviously not the right person to continue that work. So help from others is really needed.

I won't download Zomplog though. I have time enough to fulfull with developing core features and code of Serendipity. I leave that up to someone else who wants to help the Serendipity project by improving the user interface.

Best regards,
Garvin

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Wed Feb 21, 2007 4:57 pm

the cronjob plugin. but I will give it another try - but still: If Zomplog can do it with just one check in a checkbox, why all these plugins? Sorry for being obstinate...

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 10:00 am

Hi!

Since you nagged so much about Zomplog, I just installed it and had a look.

The moblog plugin is a funny one: It Loads and queries your mailbox EVERY TIME you load a blog entry. That's an absolute performance killer. It means opening an IMAP connection EVERY TIME A VISITOR COMES TO YOUR BLOG. I wrote it in capital letters to show the impact of that.

We could've done that with the popfetcher plugin of s9y as well, but if you have 10 visitors a second, you would have 10 email processes a second, which can easily kill of your blog. So this is not really an option for a page that has any visitors at all.

Our cronjob plugin ensures that a task is only ran every X minutes. And then only once.

I don't want to scare of any zomplog users: This small blog system is aimed at some nifty details and a reduced featureset, and I really love the effort they've put into the look and interface of the blog.

However, codewise, it's all very...messy. There's no real coding guidelines, many PHP error notices are suppressed (wrong variable instanciation), it has no database abstraction, no real plugin API, and the code to me looks like it could have some serious code injection problems.

Thanks though for beating me to have a look at the tool. I do see how we can improve Serendipity in terms of UI, but I also see how many things we've done right with the architecture of Serendipity

Serendipity is all about extending the core, offering flexibility. That's why we have many things as plugin only. It ensures that people who only need specific things only have specific things, and that moblogging can be easily upgraded and improved seperate from the core, and making it interact with other parts of the system.

(After reading through this again, I might get off rude, but that is not my intention!)

Best regards,
Garvin

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:17 pm

Oh, thanks for the great reply! And you don't come off rude, on the contrary I - after re-reading my posts - feel a little rude, bashing your interface like that, but I am glad you were too polite to react on my trolling. So everything's well in the end!

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:30 pm

Hi David!

All fine

I had a bad day yesterday, I must admit - so I might have reacted too frustrated about our interface issues.

The problem is this: I see our interface problems and that things should really be improved for greater "user experience". However my personal experience is at world's end, so I really need other users to help on that issue. We have one student working on the UI design currently, and I hope that his results will improve our entry screen, and that we can work on that to further improve the 'feel' of s9y.

Only thing left... I still can't get Serendipity to moblog... lol

Oh. What exactly doe snot work? Only the automatic thing, or does popfetcher even when called via the "internal" menu item not work?

Best regards,
Garvin

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:36 pm

It just doesn't work, I have to look into it in greater detail and return at a later time. Until then I use http://23hq.com and their 'badge' which you can insert into the 'html snippet' plugin on the frontpage. It works, and you can design it the way you like.

Only drawback is, when their server is slow... and it peaks sometimes.
I am a BIG Serendipity fan! I think I forgot to tell you that!

That's why I am so persistent!

Post Scriptum: It is SO nice, that Serendipity out of the box will ping blogbot.dk - the danish bloggers bot.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:41 pm

Hi!

I'm here to assist you in the popftecher plugin. It works for me, so I'm sure we should get it to work for you. It might simply be a problem that popfetcher only uses POP3 accounts, and the zomplog moblogging thing seems to use IMAP protocol...

Best regards,
Garvin

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Thu Feb 22, 2007 12:57 pm

Yes, that's why it was downloading every time it loaded. My bad, you shouldn't use an imap account.

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 10:52 am

Well, what a POP3 account can do!

Now I can get my moblogged MMS manually, by clicking POPfetcher in the sidebar. Now I have installed Cronjob and set POPfetcher to external, and crossing my fingers.

davidcrickett · Post by **davidcrickett** » Mon Mar 19, 2007 11:34 am

Yo! Moblog is working!

Moblogging

Moblogging

Re: Moblogging