mailblog

blog posts by sending emails to a nominated address.

Installation

pip install mailblog

If you want to modify code or templates, you need "development mode"

git clone https://github.com/ihaywood3/mailblog
cd mailblog
pip install -e .

This provides a command mailblog, run mailblog -h to see the full options.

Database

mailblog uses a SQLite database, which must be initialised: mailblog create.

Mailserver

Your system's mailserver must be configured to run the command mailblog mail and send the incoming e-mail on standard input when an e-mail is sent to the address you want to associate with the blogging service.

I use maildrop, the relevant part of my recipe is:

if (/^To:.*world@haywood.id.au/)
{
    cc $HOME/Mail/.World
    to "|mailblog mail"
}

NOTE: mailblog itself will accept an e-mail from anyone on the Internet and create a blog for them. Consequently you need either a spam filter or a fixed list of allowed senders that it is checked before mailblog mail is run. I have written a Bayesian spam filter in Python: spamprobe.py

Webserver

mailblog does not serve Web pages, it generates HTML files and writes to a directory (by default $HOME/public_html but can be changed with the -o option.

A webserver must then be configured to serve these files under the URL path /blog/ This can't be changed currently.

Here is my Apache configuration:

Alias /blog /home/ian/public_html
<Directory /home/ian/public_html >
	order allow,deny
	allow from all
</Directory>

CSS

The generated HTML loads its stylesheet from blog/style.css. A basic style.css is provided in the source repository, this, or your own stylesheet, must be copied to the Web directory.

Demonstration Server

This is running here