MuuBlog: Easy blogging with your mobile phone

I decided to see if I could write a simple web interface to Blogger that I could use from my mobile phone. To my surprise it was quite easy, even with my very limited PHP-skills. Follow the instructions below and you will be mobile blogging in no time.

What you need:

A web server you control, with Apache, PHP and mod_php.
The PEAR Mail package for PHP.
An account on an SMTP-server. Many ISPs provide one of these for you.

In the folder where you create your PHP-files, created two files, newblog.php and newblog_settings.php.

The approach here is not to use any of the APIs (I counted to at least three, all supported by Blogger) that Blogger provide. Instead I took the easy way out and decided to use the e-mail "gateway" to create glob posts.

First, create the settings file:

<?php
// -----------------------------
// Configuration for newblog.php
// -----------------------------
// Password required to submit the post
$required_pass = "password";
// Blogger e-mail address. This is enabled and the secret
// configured in the admin interface at Blogger.com.
$to = "My blog <username.secret@blogger.com>";
// From address.
$from = "Me <my.address@somedomain.net>";
// The SMTP-server to use.
$host = "smtp.somedomain.net";
?>

Next, the actual code in newblog.php:



<html>
 <body>
  <p>
  <?php
   include("newblog_settings.php");
   $method = $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'];
   if ($method == 'GET')
   {
   ?>
   <!-- Simple form. As light as possible. -->
   <form name="newpost" action="newblog.php" method="post">
    Password:
    <br>
    <input type="password" name="pass">
    <br>
    Subject:
    <br>
    <input type="text" name="subject">
    <br>
    Body:<br>
    <textarea name="body"></textarea>
    <br>
    <input type="submit" value="Create post">
   </form>
   <script>
     document.newpost.pass.focus();
   </script>
   <?php
   } elseif ($method == 'POST')
   {
     $pass = $_POST['pass'];
     if ($pass == $required_pass)
     {
       $subject = $_POST['subject'];
       $body = $_POST['body'];
       if ($subject == '' || $body == '')
       {
         echo "<p>Subject and body is required!</p>";
       }
       else
       {
         require_once "Mail.php";         
         $headers = array ('From' => $from,
           'To' => $to,
           'Subject' => $subject);
          $smtp = Mail::factory('smtp',
            array ('host' => $host,
              'auth' => false));
// If authentication is needed, use this:
//          $smtp = Mail::factory('smtp',
//            array ('host'     => $host,
//                   'auth'     => true,
//                   'username' => 'user',
//                   'password' => 'pass'));
         $mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $body);
         if (PEAR::isError($mail))
         {
           echo("<p>" . $mail->getMessage() . "</p>");
         } else  {
           echo("<p>Message with subject \"" . $subject . "\" successfully sent!</p>");
         }
       }
     }
     else
     {
       echo("<p>Wrong password!</p>");
     }
    ?>
    <p><a href="/newblog.php">Create a new post</a></p>
   <?php
   }
   ?>
  </p>
 </body>
</html>

The code should be quite easy to understand so I won't get into any details here.

The password check is very basic but it should work well as long as no one is sniffing your network connection. And if they do I guess you could always enable SSL.

The result of running the script looks like this:

And after posting:

Resulting post:

The screenshots are from a normal browser, but the result should look similar in even simple mobile phones that have a recent XHTML-browser.

There is one "bug" with the script and that is that characters outside ASCII (127 bit) will not be transferred correctly to the blog. I haven't figured out why, but I guess I would have to fiddle with MIME-encodings to get that working.

Happy blogging!

MuuBlog

2006-08-31

Easy blogging with your mobile phone

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