Another way to blog to CS by email
Last tuesday I wrote about how to blog by e-mail with Community Server's Email Gateway. I also said that I'll talk about other ways to send mail to your CS blog in an upcoming article. I thought this would be that upcoming article.
I really like the CS Email Gateway, since it besides blog by email, also enables the forums to send and recieve mail. So if you want you could basically use your mail client for all forum conversations. The one problem for me has been that I can't install the Email Gateway at my host. It runs as a console application or as a windows service. So unless I have a dedicated machine, I am out of luck.
But recently I took a closer look at Flickr, having seen it mentioned many times in different contextes. I knew it was a place to upload your pictures, but for that I already had the CS photo galleries. But I noticed they also had a post by email feature. You could email your pictures and they went into your Flickr galleries.
On top of that functionality they also have integration with blogs, and fortunately CS via MetaWeblogAPI. So in my Flickr settings I get the following form to integrate a CS Blog:
I then get options on how I want the blog post to show up in my blog. If there's a picture attached, how should it be sized, where in the post should it show up etc.
The blog then gets its own mailaddress that you can use to post to your CS blog.
The pictures you mail in, will be stored at your Flickr account, and linked to in your blog post. The free account at Flickr lets you upload 20 Mb per month. Works pretty good for me on the sites that I have hosted and can't implement Email Gateway for. The downsides (compared to CS Email Gateay) with the Flickr email to blog functionality that I found is, you can't set the post to not be published when it arrives at your blog, and of course it doesn't handle forums. :-)
As I wrote last tuesday, an email to blog functionality is also great for all of you that want to send pictures and posts from your mobile, when you're away from home on vacation or whatever you do when you're not at home.