Why creating a tumblr/email bridge?
One may ask that question. After all, tumblr already have a feature where you create yourself an email address on their server and can post messages through it. Yes, indeed, but I dont like it.
First, it doesn’t handle French characters correctly (characters with accents like ‘é’ and ‘à’ are replaced with code which make the post unreadable.) First limitation I couldn’t live with. I tried playing with the encoding on my email client, but couldn’t find one that would display properly.
Secondly, email messages sent from my PDA ended-up being posted with a few extra characters. So all the message appeared properly (well, except for the French characters…) but an extra garbage character or two were being appended at the end. I would live with that sort of bug either.
Third, when I tried to take a picture with my PDA phone, attached it in an email, wrote a ‘title’ and a ‘note’ in the message, and sent it, I really didn’t like the format it displayed the picture in my Tumblelog. No thumbnail, the picture was displayed full-size (annoying for a 1 Mpix picture), the image’s title and note that I had wrote were ignored, etc. So I wouldn’ use it.
Those three problems motivated me enough to write my own tumblr/email bridge. I am writing it in Java, using the JavaMail API. I’m quite familiar with that API; I used it for the last 10 years for different projects at work. The most chalenging part so far was to find the proper configuration for JavaMail to connect to Gmail through POP3 over an encrypted connection. But it worked eventually. So far, it’s pooling every X minutes and, when a new message arrives, it posts it on my tumblr. I haven’t dealt with images, video, links, and quotes yet, but I don”t foresee any big road blocks. As far as I’m concern, being able to compose a message for my tumblelog off-line on my PDA and have it posted later when I sync or connect online covers 90% of what I want to do. Additional features are going to be implemented depending how much time I divert from my novel writing. :-)
(And, by the way, this message was composed on my PDA, just to test if my little tool is working with slightly longer posts.)
