JekyllMail: Posting to Jekyll from Email

There are a few problems with Jekyll / Octopress though that would, realistically, make me less inclined to use it. First, you need to have your entire blog checked out on whatever box you’re posting from, and that is simply not something I’m willing to do on a work computer, and not something I necessarily can do when on a borrowed computer. Secondly, the user interface sucks. Well, there really isn’t one.

Being able to send e-mail to your blog and have it posted solves both of these problems. I can e-mail from anywhere, and there are tons of e-mail clients with good user interfaces, and there are good Markdown apps on the iOS that will e-mail off your Markdown formatted writings. I wouldn’t be surprised if they handled Textile too, but I wouldn’t know.

So, I did a little hunting around and found a script by Ted Kulp that works with procmail to post a Markdown, Textile, or HTML formatted post to a Jekyll blog. Procmail’s not an option for many of us, but POP3 is. So, I did a little hacking, added POP3 support, made some configuration and anti-spam tweaks and JekyllMail was born.

In addation to importing your post it will also save your image attachments. I heartily encourage folks to fork the repo on Github and send in pull requests.