For me, a handy bit of functionality I needed for my Idno powered personal lifestream site, is the ability to make posts via email.

Idno has a powerful mobile view, but sometimes even that is too bandwidth intensive, and quite often I like to be able to fire and forget; use the native apps on my phone or laptop that better handle disconnection.

So, I put together a quick plugin that allows you to make posts via email!

How it works

The plugin, once installed and configured, will let you generate a secret email address to which you send your email.

Out of the box the plugin will allow you to make status updates, long form posts (where the length of the subject and message body exceeds 140 characters), and even upload photos, and you can extend it further in your own plugins!

Installation

Installation requires you to have access to your own mail server (which if you’re a good indieweb / prism-breaking citizen you should be). You create an email alias that will pipe the email through a incoming email script, and then configure your email server to direct email to this handler for your domain.

The repository readme has some more detailed instruction (and of course there are many other techniques for firing email through the script).

» Visit the project on Github…

opengraphlogo Open Graph is a technology that provides information about a website or a website object. Among other things, this is how Facebook and G+ gets details about the youtube video that you just posted.

Support for this was missing from base Idno, and since I wanted it for my other site, I wrote a quick plugin.

This plugin provides open graph headers for your idno site, and detailed descriptions for individual permalinks, but it also provides functionality to extract open graph details from other sites when you post links. This means that you’ll get some extra details displayed about a site when you post a link to it.

Hopefully this’ll be useful to you!

» Visit the project on Github…

Just a quick update to point you good folk over to a couple of Idno plugins I’ve put up on github.

The first, LoginSyslog, is a simple plugin that outputs login events (success and failure) to the Auth.log, in much the same way as my Elgg fail2ban plugin. This allows you to audit login attempts on your Idno site, as well as use a tool like fail2ban to protect your site from brute force attacks.

The second, Pingback, adds support for incoming Pingback. Idno primarily supports webmention as a notification mechanism, and while legacy support for outgoing pingbacks, however incoming pingback support was missing. This plugin adds the missing functionality, meaning your Idno site will play nicely with WordPress and similar.

Happy hacking!