Lunatic Weblog by anima

Guide: How not to suck on mailing lists: #2. Thread Hijacking

Thread hijacking in email communication is the act of composing a new mail to a mailing list or newsgroup by replying to an existing but unrelated message and just changing the subject line and body of the message instead of composing a new message from scratch. Source

For example, you throw a question to the mailinglist asking if anyone knows something about X and you go like, “Hello guys, does anyone know about X?”. And then someone pops out and reply, “BTW, does anyone know about Y?”.. Like this.

That’s thread hijacking, it’s setting the thread off topic and it’s evil. That should go to the book of sins, heheh.

June 3rd, 2008. BBC, Guides, neighborhood. 3 Comments

Howto: Post to your Wordpress blog by email

You can post to your Wordpress blog via email without installing any additional plugin. Basically how it works is: you send an email to an assigned email address → the email gets published as a new post on your blog → everyone’s happy with this and we all live happily ever after. Here’s a short tutorial on how to get it working in no time.

First, you have to create an email address on your server

If you don’t have control of this and/or you don’t know how to do it best to ask your server admin, I cannot help you much on this area.

Every email sent to this address will be posted to your blog, so make the email address unique and hard to guess; like Ybeu6QW@yourdomain.com. Note the email address and password because you’ll need this (ya of course lah!).

The next step is to setup Wordpress to receive mail from the address

The setting is located on yourwpsite.com/wp-admin/options-writing.php and it looks like this ↓

There you can enter the login information for that unique email you created earlier. Usually if the email is name@domain.com; the mail server is mail.domain.com. Use full email address as login name and the port is 110. Default mail category is self explanatory, if you don’t understand that then it’s a miracle that you’re reading this far.

Tip: It’s a good idea to test the email with your favorite mail client first (like Outlook or Thunderbird) before proceeding to the next step just to see if it works.

Now on to sending the email

The rules are simple:

1. The subject line will be used as the Post Title
2. The message body will be used as the Post Content
3. Wordpress will strip common HTML tags. To play safe, I use plain text when testing this.

Publishing the post

Tho it seems a bit odd, but you need to pull the trigger yourself to actually publish the post to your Wordpress blog. After sending the post email you can do this by accessing the URL yoursite.com/wp-mail.php.

If everything goes well, the page will show something like this (actual posted article can be seen here):

It’s a hassle, yes, but there is an alternative way so you don’t have to do that. It is by entering this HTML snippet on the end of your post:

<iframe src="http://yoursite.com/wp-mail.php" name="mailiframe" width="0" height="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title=""></iframe>

That way everytime you send an email to the assigned address it gets published instantly. Cool eh? But one thing I don’t really understand. How can we benefit from this feature? Anyone have any idea?

May 28th, 2008. BBC, Guides, Interesting, Wordpress. 14 Comments

Howto: Replace your h1 text with an image

The purpose of this howto is to replace your <h1> text with an image resulting something like this

Why?

Because you can have a simple anchor text like <h1>very good keyword</h1> seen by search engine and in the same time you get an image saying another cool tagline.

And because images is prettier than plain text, unless you’re Jon Tangerine, that is.

How?

First you have to create an image that you’re going to use to replace the <h1> tag and note the dimension (that is the height and width).

The html is pretty simple really:

<h1>Something here</h1>

And the CSS goes like this:

h1 {
background: url(images/url_ke_gambar.jpg);
height: tinggi_gambar_disini px;
text-indent: -999em;
width: lebar_gambar_disini px
}

Piece of cake, eh? Now you’d want to take this further by replacing other html tags with images. You can apply the same CSS style to any html tag like <label> or <h4 class="title">. But do remember tho, if you want to use it on a link, you will need to define display: block to the link, like this

h1 a {
background: url(images/url_ke_gambar.jpg);
display: block;
height: tinggi_gambar_disini px;
text-indent: -999em;
width: lebar_gambar_disini
}

Well, so much for a tutorial eh? I’m not good at this but I’m trying :D

Note: the tinggi_gambar_disini px thing should look like 190px, I write the space in between for the sake of nice reading.

May 22nd, 2008. BBC, Guides, Interesting, Wordpress. 23 Comments