Saturday, October 04, 2003

I'm testing the Mail-to-Weblog feature of Radio Userland. I just created a dedicated email address for the purpose of posting remotely via email. To use this feature, you must have an email account accessible by a POP3 connection. Radio connects to the email server you specify and downloads all messages for the account. Only messages with a configurable secret subject are posted. This should be fun. It will be a nice way to post remotely without the need for logging into my website. The question remains, though: how do I control things like title, link, and categories with this technique? My hunch is that it is primitive and will not support a more advanced post. Here's hoping to be proved wrong. Sorry that this is my first post in a while. My life is crazy right now. Probably because I'm crazy. I've got so many things going at once. I call it "trying to push 50 strings ahead at once." Anyone ever made much progress pushing a string from the rear? Books to read, web programming, certification study, career planning...Oh yeah, then there's the domestic tasks: yard work, pets, etc. Sorry, I know I'm whining. On a related note, I asked a Linux guru friend of mine, Aaron Spangler, how to set up Linux as an ISP-style mail server that does not require real Linux accounts for mail access. I'm running postfix as my MTA on a Mandrake 8.2 distribution. The only way I know so far to setup an email account is to create an actual server account. Aaron wisely suggested that I use openLDAP to store accounts and passwords for email access. He also mentioned an application called "exim" as a workable component to my ultimate solution. I love that idea. I haven't climbed the learning curve yet, but it will be great when I do. I'm thinking of providing email accounts to a few members of my family. We'll see. Comments about MTAs, postfix, Mandrake, and openLDAP are welcome. If you've done this before, point me in the right direction. I saw a book on postfix at Borders that contained a couple of chapters on using openLDAP *OR* MySQL to manage user accounts. $40 is something I'll have to wait on considering all of the other books and projects calling my name. I'll wait until I actually have the time to implement it.

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