CS2: Send an email to your blog
One of the greatest blog features in Community Server is IMO the ability to blog by email. To send an email from your favorite mail client to your blog, and have it show up as a post on your blog. This opens up a couple of opportunities besides being able to format the blog post in an easy way. For example, you can write your posts even when you are not able to be online. I know, even on flights nowadays you can be online, but still there could be times when you're offline. Also you could blog from your mobile phone if it has email functions.
The blog by email feature also takes cares of attachements. So if you attach a picture to the email your sending, it will show up as a picture in your post. This means that you can also start a photo blog, like TextAmerica ond others.
But.....it does not come with the Express edition. You need to have the Email Gateway Add On, which requires at least the Standard Edition License. There are other ways to mail to your blog without the Email Gateway, but with somewhat reduced functionality, but I'll try to write about in an upcoming article.
To enable this feature, after installing the licenses and the Email Gateway Addon, go to:
Control Panel -> Administration -> Blogs -> Blogs -> Edit (for the blog to enable) -> Blog By Email Tab
Just click in the 'Yes' radio button. If you now go to your blog, assuming you're using the standard skin, you should see the folllowing in the right sidebar:
There's a new choice called 'New Post by Email', which is a mailto link with a unique email adress for that particular blog. Save that email address in your contacts and use it whenever you need to send a blog post by mail.
Note: You'll have to send the mail from the email address that you have registered in your profile for that CS community.
Want to see a video about this topic? Rob Howard has done a video you can watch on Blogging By Email.