NOTE: this is a legacy post ported from the old blog platform for archiving purposes
Et voila! My fìrst meaningful mobile post, although edited on computer. This post is a compilation of a series of problems and their solutions which I experienced while linking my phone to my blog.
Lets start from the blog. Serendipity has a plugin available via SPARTACUS called Popfetcher. What this does is fetch emails from a POP3 inbox, format them, and post them on your blog. It’s quite a mature piece of kit and therefore very customisable. I created a gmail account for this and it worked without any hassle.
Now all I had to do was send an email to this account from my phone.
My first attempt failed miserably. I tried sending an MMS to that email address only find a message indicating a URL where I could read the actual message. Nice one O2, you’ve managed to break MMS-to-email functionality.
My second attempt involves setting up an email account on my phone, most modern mobiles have this functionality and I’m lucky my SonyEricsson k800i does too. This failed because of O2 again: to save money, the only connection I use on my contract SIM card is a GSM based one (not GPRS based). This is because I get several hours free every month. If I used GPRS I would have been fine, but with GSM one can only, as far as I’ve deduced, make an outgoing connection on port 80 through O2′s proxy, so as to browse the web via HTTP. This was also a problem while setting up my previously Blogger-dependent system.
My third attempt was the last idea I had, aside from starting to use the insanely overpriced GPRS connection. I figured O2 would surely not block their own email servers, so I painstakingly signed up for a new account on O2 (please fix your website!) just for the email, luckily one can register the same mobile number several times (I’m sure there are 5 or 6 accounts registered to my number :D), and searched around for the SMTP configuration details. My prediction was right, the O2 proxy allows SMTP connections only to the O2 mail server (and apparently to BT Yahoo! mail).
I had now linked my mobile phone to my blog. Success!
I also added nl2br() to the popfetcher plugin code, and, before you suggest it, I removed the serendipity plugin for automatic line breaks when it caused problems as I pasted from the clipboard into the WYSIWYG post editor.
That sorted, all I need is for London Underground to put antennas in the tunnels!
